iPhoto XML File Woes.
What I really want at the moment is an option in iPhoto for it to read back data from the XML file it generates. This file’s name is AlbumData.xml and its found in your iPhoto Library.
At the moment if you take this file, change some info in it, ie search and replace for certain strings in all the comments and then re-open iPhoto it just writes over the XML with the old data that it gets from its Binary .db file ignoring any changes you made to the file.
This is rather annoying if you ask me, however i will explain a few good reasons why you might want it to read data from the file back in in a moment.
You may find that a friend that you had a few hundred photo’s of in your library with there name in every photo’s comment decided to change there name. You try changing all of the individual comments from within iPhoto, it would take you forever and a day! What you could do on the other hand is load up the xml file in TextWrangler / an xml parser and use search and replace to change all of the names in only a few seconds. Much easier than doing it manually.
Now if your wondering why there is this XML file in the Library that is updated but never read in the first place, well there is a good reason for it, Legacy Support.
Older versions of iPhoto used to use it to store all there info about each photo in it, however over time people started to complain about large libraries having slow load/access speeds so around versions 4 or 5 Apple decided to move to a proprietary binary format for all the data storage which allows for faster reading and writing, which in turn speeds up the application.
Now when they did make the change they originally just removed the XML file, however people all over the place complained like crazy because they had scripts and that sort of thing that read the old xml file to get comments and dates and things like that for there Online Web Galleries, so it appears that Apple’s developers resurrected the XML file for these people, whereby it is written out to, however never read back into iPhoto.
What i really want is the ability to load the xml data back into iPhoto so that it can be once again used to update comments and the like within iPhoto.
SO I Say Please Please Please……. Give us this functionality back. Either by allowing us to load it in via the repair database menu, or alternatively have a cmd line option or a tick box in the Preferences, under advanced options that says something like:
(Warning : May slow down loading of large Libraries.)”.
BTW: to get to the Repair Database menu that I mentioned before you need to hold down Cmd(Apple) + Option(Alt) keys while launching iPhoto. (Version 4 instead uses the Shift + Option Keys)
-End Rant! - Richie.
(PS: Yes i have started to use iPhoto. Version 5 is really quite snappy and responsive, plus I was getting sick of trying to keep a folder full of images organised manually.)