MAC OS X - question about viewing pictures in finder

Hi everyone ..

I switched over to Apple about a year ago .. and have been quite pleased with everything .. overall, have had a very good experience with the various different applications .. and especially the operating system .. which I find to be more stable, more intuitive actually ..

The ONE thing I miss about windows .. is flipping through a directory of photos .. and renaming and deleting pictures at a keystroke .. you know how in the Windows explorer .. you can flip through a director in the "filmstrip" mode .. and just press the "delete" key on the pictures that you want to get rid of .. I do a lot of digital photography .. and most pictures are just crap and need to be deleted .. while I really like Apple's "Slideshow" .. and the "Preview" application .. I have to go back to the directory .. and remember the file name or squint on the small icons to delete pictures ..

Is there an application that will let me do the Windows equivalent of the "film-strip" thing? ..

Thanks in advance,
Bilal

 

you can select all your pictures, control-click -> open with the picture viewer (I don't know the exact name in english, since my osx is in dutch). The standard picture viewer program.

 

hi, yes I missed the filmstrip feature too.

here are a few things you can do.

1) within finder you can right click while in a folder and select 'get info' - this allows you to change the settings for the folder so it gives you a preview of the icons... however this is only thumbnail size

2) also within finder if you select a number of number of pictures (by holding down command or shift while clicking) and then you open in preview, preview opens with a sidebar that lets you (a) swap between pics and (b) re-arrange the order of the pics letting you compare two adjacent ones

I only discovered number 2 this weekend and it has exactly the same functionality as the filmstrip mode you describe.

Of course the third option is to import into iPhoto and preview from there... or use a third party app like Shoebox.

HTH.

 

Yeah that opens the "preview" application .. with all the pictures in the drawer, on the right .. that's helpful, yes .. but I can't use it to delete the pictures I don't want .. you know like when you download a bunch of pictures from your digital camera .. and you only want to keep the good ones .. for that I have to keep in mind the file name .. (which is really a pain with the camera filenames .. DSC0322, blah, blah, blah) ..

I was hoping there would be like a small little application that would let me do that .. I still haven't really gotten used to iPhoto .. maybe I should start using that .. but that then keeps two copies .. and that's too confusing ..

Bilal

 

check out the trial version of Shoebox, it's quite good if you don't want to cross over to iPhoto. I think you can delete pics if you go for the option 2 i described tho I dont have my Mac here to check.

 

oh my god, you're right! ..

in the preview window .. once you've selected a bunch of pictures and opened them .. if you click on the thumbnail in the drawer and do a apple-key+delete .. it deletes the picture from the directory! ..

my prayers have been answered! ..

thank you! ..

I'm still going to be looking into ShoeBox .. a program to help organize pictures .. does anyone have any suggestions? .. how about iView? .. what are some good alternates to iPhoto? ..

Bilal

 

adobe bridge (comes with photoshop CS) is pretty versatile.

shoebox is nice and lets you keep your own folder structure, also it supports RAW for most cameras.

the more i use iPhoto the more I like it but like you I don't want to give up on my directory structure, it would make it very difficult to move away from mac os if i ever wanted to.

I really don't understand how iPhoto stores pictures... the whole 'modified' and 'original' thing... and at the weekend i opened a picture from iPhoto in photoshop, made some changes, hit "save as...", then couldnt view the new version in iPhoto, but then when I tried to import it it told me it was already there...

it's a nice viewer but I don't like it's folder structure AT ALL...

 

Lightroom can browse photo's in the folder structure AND let you edit them. It's more robust than Bridge, but it depends what you want.

 

i trialled lightroom and liked it but for me it was overkill.

I went with bibble pro for RAW conversion and manage my own folders, so far I only import my 'final' pictures into iPhoto (ie after eliminating candidates, doing the RAW conversion and any PP in photoshop, I import my best 'keepers' to albums on iPhoto).

 

yes, that's the problem that I've had with iPhoto .. the fact that it doesn't keep the original directory structure .. and the fact that you don't know where the pictures are being stored .. I mean, is the program making duplicates? .. do you delete your originals? .. it's too confusing! .. (I'm sort of a neat-freak when it comes to my hard-drive .. the thought of duplicate files would seriously give me sleepless nights!) ..

I don't need to edit my photos .. I just need to be able to store and organize them in a logical manner .. so that I can go back to them, at a later time .. that's really all .. after a year's worth of photos .. I usually move the previous year's photos on to an external hard-drive .. apart from my photos, I download a lot of pictures from Flickr .. that I want to keep ..

but maybe that's the point behind iPhoto .. maybe there's no point in worrying about "directory structure" .. and you're supposed to trust the application to do all that for you .. I don't know .. I'm going to have to try out iPhoto and see how it goes .. I get the feeling the program doesn't want me to waste time on directories .. and sort of let it do all of that ..

I will have a look at Lightroom and Shoebox .. thank you, everyone, for your replies and suggestions ..

 

Leopard is going to have "Cover Flow", which is quite similar to Filmstrip mode. So, worst come to worst, you could just wait for Leopard.

 

Yes, I saw that .. I'm really looking forward to Leopard! ..

I think the "Cover Flow" thing will make life really convenient .. flipping through documents will be a breeze! ..

I love APPLE!

 

well, that's the point of iPhoto and apple: use less the finder and just do everything in the program. Like u said, they don't want you to worry about the dir structure. iPhoto will worry about that. You can easily export or duplicate a picture into your desktop. You can choose various settings when you want to export a picture. But I'm wondering how I can make or rename a filmstrip/roll...

 

Yes I think this is the idea of iPhoto but the problem comes if you have been used to a particular folder structure it's difficult to let go. Also it would mean a lot of work if you ever wanted to go back to Windows or other directory based system.

By the way it doesn't have to be duplicates, you can delete the source files when you import. I've gone for a 'halfway house' for the moment: the original RAW and JPEG files from a 'shoot' are stored in folders outside of iPhoto. I use Bibble Pro to convert candidates to JPEG, then I sort candidates with Preview or Shoebox to settle on 'keepers'. These get uploaded to my flickr account and transferred to a folder i call 'for iPhoto'. I then use the automator to import those pics into iPhoto, deleting the source files.

So I end up with my original pictures in a normal folder stucture which is easier to back up and maintain. My precious 'keepers' are also in these folders, plus they are in iPhoto and on Flickr... which is a triple back up

If I stick with Mac OS X maybe I'll give up on the folder structure and let iPhoto take over, but I'm not sure it's a good idea if I ever want to go back to a more conventional system.

This is quite easy... when you are viewing the films roll, click the little info button at the bottom of the screen then you can rename it in the info box.

This is one of the features that might allow me to move completely to iPhoto... I could keep the original pics in a film roll and the keepers in an album. However, there is now way to group the albums into folders so you would end up with a LOAD of albums and no way to sort them...

 

I just did some googling and found articles you might found interesting.

This one in particular gives me a clue how I might completely go over to iPhoto withough losing my mind:

Data, Originals, and Modified

iPhoto 6 organizes its photos fairly differently that previous versions. Imported photos will initially be stored inside the "Originals" folder. Within that folder, photos are organized into subfolders based on the roll that they are in, so each roll gets its own folder. Those rolls are then sorted by date (2006, 2005, etc.) and put into dated folders accordingly. So, if you had a photo in a roll named "Vacation" and dated February 24, 2004, to find that photo, go into the "Originals" folder, then into "2004", then into the folder named "Vacation". When you edit a photo in iPhoto, the original stays where it is, and the edited photo is placed in the "Modified" folder, which has the same per-roll organization scheme within it as the "Originals" folder does. The "Data" folder contains all the scaled down thumbnail version of photos in your library. If you upgrade to iPhoto 6 from a previous version, iPhoto will rearrange all your photos from the old scheme into the new scheme. After upgrading, you may still see one or more leftover folders named "2004" and such. These folders should no longer contain any files being used by iPhoto 6, and can be disposed of safely.​

From here

So if you import and rename your rolls, your 'conventional' folder structure can be maintained (and retrieved!) from the 'Originals' sub-folder. With the exception that you can't make sub-folders by subject.

 

thanks for the tip. Now that I can rename my filmrolls, it's easier to organise everything. But it's a shame that I can't make "subroll". Even not when I'm creating a folder...