What happens if I turn on sharing in iPhoto 11?

October 21, 2012 6:40 PM

If I allow iPhoto to share photos with my Facebook and Flickr accounts, will I regret it?

I have hundreds, if not thousands, of photos on Flickr, and a handful on Facebook. The photos on both accounts have comments from friends and family, and the Flickr photos are largely organized into sets and with tags. There are some photos I put up on-line for a while then took down, but still have in iPhoto and want to keep.

I use iPhoto '11 on my Mac. It has an option to turn on sharing for Facebook and Flickr. What I would like to happen is for the tags, comments, and sets to be imported into iPhoto. What I'm afraid will happen is that photos will be deleted from iPhoto.

Should I turn on sharing?

posted by The corpse in the library to computers & internet (3 answers total)

The sharing feature in iPhoto only lets you upload your photos to those external services. It does not suck in photos from those services or any tags, comments, etc. And it definitely does not delete photos from iPhoto based on the connection.
posted by birdherder at 6:58 PM on October 21, 2012 [1 favorite]

Are you sure? That's not what these people say in the Flickr help forum, unless they're talking about something else.
posted by The corpse in the library at 7:58 PM on October 21, 2012

They're talking about photos that originated in iPhoto which were then pushed to Flickr using a sync function and lost when the person deleted something from either photo repository. You're looking to save photos that are on Facebook and Flickr into iPhoto which is not possible in the capacity you want. The tags, the comments, etc can't be imported in the way you think they can be because they aren't metadata in the traditional sense.

There are apps that may (heavy emphasis on may) do this, however:

http://www.photofetch.co/

I would be very careful about authenticating 3rd party apps with your FB login info though.
posted by These Birds of a Feather at 9:36 PM on October 21, 2012