Exporting an iphoto album

August 21, 2006 2:14 PM

I had all my wedding pictures on my ibook (4.7 GB's worth). My wife and I started to sort them by making albums in iphoto. Then, I had to transfer all the photos to my imac. On the ibook, I can still see the albums and thumbnails, but the ACTUAL pictures are no longer there. Is there a way to export the albums to the imac, a la an itunes playlist? I have ilife 05' on the ibook and ilife 06' on the imac.
posted by drewcopeland to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Before you do anything, please, please, please...back-up those pictures onto either CDs or a data DVD.
Don't start moving and futzing around with them until you do so. Trust me on this. A hd crash always comes at exactly the wrong time...like when you're making wedding albums.
Apologizes for the slight derail
posted by Thorzdad at 2:25 PM on August 21, 2006

How did you transfer them to the imac?

have you tried copying the AlbumData.xml over? It's in the User>Pictures>iPhoto Library directory.

Also, on starting the app, you can hold down the shift-option keys upon startup. This will allow you to rebuild the thumbnails, database, etc. But back everything up before you do this.
posted by grimley at 2:42 PM on August 21, 2006

Note if both computers are on the same network the easiest way is to share your iPhoto album and see the album from the other computer (at least, with the newest iPhoto version anyway). You can copy items from the shared folders to the local computer by dragging and dropping. Note you will need to tweak the 'sharing' settings in iPhoto on both computers. Also note the shared photos are the edited photos, not the original ones (which *should* be hiding on your HD somewhere unless you explicitly erased them).
posted by drmarcj at 2:56 PM on August 21, 2006

Aroo? drmarcj, the easiest way to share iPhoto albums is simply to enable album sharing in the preferences. It works just like the iTunes library sharing.

And drewcopeland, yeah, you can do this. Make a folder on the Desktop on the original machine that has all of the photos. Then select the photos that you want to export, go to "Share" and choose "Export." This will do a nice simple export/copy of the original photos to a new location. Then copy that folder to a DVD and burn your photos to a DVD. Take that DVD to the other machine, and choose "Import to Library" - voila! Imported photos, and a burned DVD to store away somewhere.
posted by drstein at 4:00 PM on August 21, 2006