moving iphotos to picasa--metadata transfer?

July 9, 2006 6:55 PM

I am moving almost 7 gb of Iphoto pictures to my wife's pc laptop/picasa. If I drag my photos library to my ipod (which has been formatted to work on her pc as well) will any metadata, such as the date the picture was taken, be transferred? Or should I just rename all of my photos to the date they were taken before doing the transfer? Has anyone else done this?

I don't have a dvd burner on either machine.

posted by craniac to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Try with a few pictures from each of your rolls and see if the results are to your liking. You will then know what you need to do to meet your specific needs.
posted by secret about box at 7:12 PM on July 9, 2006

Response by poster: Thanks, that's a good methodology. Both laptops are physically apart right now, so that isn't yet feasible.
posted by craniac at 7:15 PM on July 9, 2006

Best answer: The date you take the picture is embedded in the JPEG file by your camera. If both apps are properly written the date will be transferred automatically.
posted by cillit bang at 7:17 PM on July 9, 2006

The Internet does not care if two computers are physically apart. Just ask an e-mail server.
posted by secret about box at 7:20 PM on July 9, 2006

Like cillit bang said, the date is embedded in the files themselves. Keywords, date changes in iPhoto itself, titles, captions, etc. will not be exported.
posted by nathan_teske at 8:07 PM on July 9, 2006

Response by poster: The Internet does not care if two computers are physically apart. Just ask an e-mail server.

The internet cares if one of them is offline.
posted by craniac at 8:48 PM on July 9, 2006

Physical separation is still a trivial barrier, though. It's either brand-new or a Mac recent enough to run iPhoto, which means it at least shipped with the ability to get on-line. We have no reason to assume one of the machines is somehow incapable of getting on-line.

It appeared to be worth making my follow-up post because, no offense to the original poster, he hadn't thought to try a few pictures and see what the result would be, so there was a good chance it also simply hadn't occurred to him to grab a few and fire up Mail.app.
posted by secret about box at 9:52 PM on July 9, 2006

Rather, it's a Mac new enough to run iPhoto (which means it shipped with blah blah blah), or it's new enough to run Picasa and handle 7 GB of photos. That suggests that it more than likely shipped with the ability to get to the Internet.
posted by secret about box at 9:57 PM on July 9, 2006

Response by poster: The problem is that I was at work copying the photos over to the ipod and trying to determine if it was necessary to rename or otherwise try to embed metadata. The pc was at home, offline, some distance away, and I had to finish the job that night. Ok, I'm an industrial spy--happy now?

Anyway, the photos copies over. Picasa imported Iphotos goofy file structure, so if I do this in the future I will stick all of my source photos in date-labeled folders for the sake of organization.
posted by craniac at 7:03 AM on July 10, 2006

there are a few utilities out there that can embed iPhoto's metadata into the JPEGs in the IPTC format (assuming Picasa can read that). Unfortunately, as near as I can tell, one of these will do for keywords and another for title/caption ("caption buddy", which seems to be AWOL, but I do have a copy)—you can't get all in one.

It's a real shame that iPhoto doesn't use IPTC itself, but there you go.
posted by adamrice at 7:18 AM on July 10, 2006