# Exporting from LR to iPhoto



## vipgeorges (Jan 2, 2014)

Hi everyone,

Here's what I'm trying to achieve: I use LR as my primary editing software and I think it's great. However, I find that I iPhoto has a lot of great things going for it:
* it makes it more fun and easy to add metadata to photos (mainly face tagging)
* iPhoto is also (to me) a better viewing experience (I like the UI)
* iPhoto syncs with iPad seamlessly and my long term plan (dream) is to have all my photos on my iPad (when iPad storage allows)

Here's what I'd like to do, but having a hard time figuring out how to:

1/ I have 10K photos in LR, all the photos taken in the past 5 years or so are RAW. I want to:

convert all photos to jpeg
maintain file structure
Decrease resolution
export all these photos to iphoto
2/ workflow for future photos, I would ideally like to do the following:

edit my photos in LR
mark the ones that I really like
these photos get converted into jpeg and sent to iPhoto

Some things about me:

I have a powerful iMac with and ample storage space
I shoot a D800 with Zeiss lenses so quality is important to me.
I don't keep a lot of photos that's why I "only" have 10K photos
Some of my photos are super high rez multi-row panoramas that weigh hundreds of Mbs and need a lot of downscalling
I have a Time Machine and a Crashplan backup. My current project is not about a 3rd backup strategy.

Any idea how I can achieve some/all of the above without spending weeks doing things manually?

Thank you all
Georges


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## erro (Jan 2, 2014)

Here is how I have solved it:

- Lots of photos in LR
- I use "publish services" to export each years photos to its own folder
- I use iTunes to sync the photos in those folders (or rather their parent folder) to my iPad

Every now and then I right-click on my publish service and select "publish now". This will create/update all photos. Every now and then I will do an iTunes WiFi-sync (either from the computer or the iPad), which will transfer all photos from the computer to the iPad.

Right now I have around 3.700 photos from 2010-2014. They are exported with the longest side of 2048 pixels. In total they take up 2,4 GB on the iPad.


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## clee01l (Jan 2, 2014)

Georges, Welcome to the forum. 
I use iPhoto only to populate my iCloud photostream. (I bypass iPhoto to transfer the iCloud Photostream directly to a watch folder where LR auto imports into the catalog.) After the photostream is populated, I delete the iPhoto images so that I don't have derivative copies og my LR cataloged work on my local HD

I have set up a HD Publish service in LR.  It publishes to the "/Users/{userName}/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Auto Import" folder inside iPhoto.  You need to first set this folder up with an alias outside of iPhoto Library to access it directly using the LR Publish Service.  This should get you exactly what you ask for in the way of generation reduced resolution JPEGs for iPhoto.  iPhoto will automatically sync its new imports with your iCloud Photostream where they will be accessible with your iPad.

If you need more details on how to set up and use a HD publish Service or how to create the alias, let me know and I'll work something up.  

FWIW, I shoot with a D800 too.


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## erro (Jan 2, 2014)

Clee, what happens if you export an updated version of an already synced photo? Will the new photo replace the old in the photo stream? Or will there be two versions of the same photo? Or will the first photo remain?


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## vipgeorges (Jan 2, 2014)

Thanks Erro, thanks Clee.

Clee - 2 question for you: 

* how would I conserve the folder structure that I currently have in LR? Each folder is an album and I don't want to loose that organization
* how would I batch publish the hundreds of albums that I currently have in LR?

Thanks
Georges


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## clee01l (Jan 3, 2014)

Presumably, your existing master originals are D800 NEFs  LR is not organizing these by folder even though you and your filesystem are.  LR is simply recording the path to the master original NEF in the metadata maintained in the catalog. HD Publish Services and any other collection set/collection is a grouping of images. I'll call these groupings  "buckets". They only exist as virtual "buckets". There is no physical structure to them. And they only have meaning inside of LR.  The file system folders are also virtual "buckets" and there is no physical structure to them either.  (you can call them "albums" if  you like) The biggest two differences between these two organization schemes is that Filesystem folders can contain files and subfolders with one file existing in one and only one folder. 

In the virtual system used by LR. Collection sets can only contain other collection set and collections.  IOW, images can only be members of a Collection not a collection set.  Unlike the file system, Images can reside in more than one collection. 

Folders and subfolders containing folders are like LR Collection sets. Folders that contain only images and no subfolders are like LR collections.  LR maintains a subset of the filesystem folders in the Folder Panel for all folders that contain images that are in the LR catalog.

Now iPhoto maintains a virtual organization structure like LR Collection sets/Collections.  iPhoto calls the equivalent of LR Collection sets "Folders" and it calls the equivalent of LR Collections "Albums".  Just like LR, Albums can not contain folders but folders can contain other folders and Albums. 

Pardon me for laying out the terminology but it was probably necessary to understand what I am about to describe.

Now you want iPhoto Albums to match your Filesystem "Folders". Unless you have unchecked the "Copy items to the iPhoto Library"  in preferences,  iPhoto is going to import any images where it damn well pleases and create a new folder structure inside the iPhoto Library.  So, leave the check box unchecked and iPhoto will import the images in place.  It will not create albums automatically (at least I have not found a way to do so but I did not try very hard either)  It will organize by "Event"  (Another virtualization of the images in iPhoto) and it will create "Events" based upon the name of the filesystem source folder containing the image files.  Events are not iPhoto Albums.

You probably want your exported derivatives to be the folders the iPhoto calls masters.  If that is the case, you can not use the iPhoto Auto Import.   You will instead create a HD Publish Service the writes to folders in the filesystem based upon the Publish Service collection names and having a hierarchy of collection sets to create a structure folder scheme.  (There is an easier third party Publish Service plugin and I will point you to it later on in this reply.) There is where the derivative JPEGs will live on your HD to be hosted by iPhoto in the iPhoto Library. Once you have published your LR export JPEG, you will have to manually import these into the iPhoto Library

In the LR Publish Service you can create collections that match the names of your folder where you have manually organized your current inventory.  If for example you have LR NEF images cataloged with the path "/Users/{userName}/Pictures/Christmas2013", You can create a Publish Collection for the iPhoto Publish Service and name that collection "Christmas2013"   iPhoto will not create any iPhoto album and iPhoto will not create any iCloud Photostream Album until you manually do these things your self in iPhoto after manually importing these folders into iPhoto. 

You can also use the Auto Import feature of iPhoto but there are trade offs to using the Auto Import folder in iPhoto.  iPhoto will auto import and create Events named after your Auto Import subfolders. And when published by LR, it will be imported into the iPhoto library as soon as it hits the folder 
Having done that it will copy the images from the source (and if the source is the ../iPhoto Library/Auto Import folder, delete the originals)  You new master copies will be placed in folders buried in the iPhoto Library in folder names like " ../iPhoto Library/Masters/2014/01/02/20140102-201810".  It matters not whether the "Copy items to the iPhoto Library" is checked in preferences, iPhoto will always move images out of the auto import folder into an internal folder structure of its own choosing. 

If we are going to automatically move a derivative image (JPEG) through LR to iPhoto, the best method that I have found is to use a HD Publish Service.   Now if you create a HD Publish Service that will write new JPEG Derivatives into the iPhoto auto import  All you need to do is point the destination folder to "/Users/{userName}/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Auto Import  When setting up the destination folder for a Publish Service, you can not navigate into the iPhoto Library folders, but you can navigate to an alias of one of those folders (i.e. "Auto Import") if the alias is outside of the iPhoto Library.

By using the same Collection naming scheme as before, the Publish service will create a folder in  "../iPhoto Library/Auto Import/Christmas2013" folder.  iPhoto will automatically import these images and they will be  assigned to the event "Christmas2013". 

Now some shortcuts:  I have not tested this or tested it to work with iPhoto Auto Import but I think it might.  I know it will work to duplicate your existing folder structure with exported JPEG images in a mirrored folder structure The plug in is called “Folder Publisher” Lightroom Plugin
http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/folder-publisher.


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## GoGas (May 30, 2014)

Clee

I wonder if you have time to point me in right direction for integrating iPhoto and Lightroom. The reasoning is that although I use LR as primary photo system a time will arise in medium term when I am not around and my wife probably finds iPhoto easier as simpler UI, is into into the depth of technology that I am and will wish to access the family photos. (For this reason I wonder if I should have gone Aperture as it will share same database as iPhoto but LR seemed so much better). The photo archive (c 15k images) is managed in top level folder with sub folder for each year and then subfolders for events, holidays within each year (images are mixture of DNG and jpeg). Photos are generally tagged, GPSed, and the IPTC headline, title and caption set in a working folder before moving to the archive. (iPhone photos are exception as they are automatically copied directly to archive by using automator folder watch action to copy from iCloud stream to working folder which is used as LR watch folder and then imported automatically into dedicated folder in main archive). LR is set to automatically update the file metadata so the files should be updated. I am aware in practice that apart from metadata dat file edits will not be visible in iPhoto but this is not major issue as my wife will not be editing photos much.

Ideally I would like to continue to use LR and am teaching my wife basics but have iPhoto automatically update its library as photos are added to the archive so if iPhoto is used the photos are visible. I am aware that I can set iPhoto not to import photos but leave them where they are and from what you say the folder names will be used as events which would be OK. I can do a one off import into iPhoto as the library is now but is there a way that iPhoto can resync itself with the archive if photos are added to different folders or moved within LR before iPhoto is next opened so iPhoto can be used as a viewer effectively. Is there are third party software that may help?

Thanks

Paul
UK


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## clee01l (May 30, 2014)

I am afraid that I am not the person to recommend iPhoto for anything. I consider it a bloated, obfuscating, worthless POS (and those are its good points).

I only use iPhoto as a vehicle to transfer images from LR to the iCloud Photostream I use another program to pull photos from the iCloud photostream to be auto imported into LR. 

If you want to use iPhoto, any image file that you place in the iPhoto Auto Import folder will get cataloged by iPhoto.  I use that feature to move Exported LR images to the iCloud  Otherwise, iPhoto does not run on my computer. And If I could figure another way to send these to iCloud, I would never have to start iPhoto


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## GoGas (May 30, 2014)

Clee

Thanks. Looks like I will be just trying to stick with LR and avoiding iPhoto. For sharing using FlickR so publishing from LR is easy.

Paul


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## claw (Apr 11, 2015)

Hi All,

I was using the method Clee outlined successfully but then I just got updated on my Mac and now I'm using the new Photos app.

Does anyone know how the autoimport on this works? I'd love to maintain the workflow that I had with LR -> iPhoto.

Thanks!

Chris


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