So…

This weekend’s been an ordeal. Switching to the Macbook has, in many ways, been quite painless. Yeah, there’s some weirdness to be had, but for the most part, I’ve found it to be a great experience… with one glaring exception.

iPhoto fucking sucks.

Now, let me be absolutely clear – part of the problem is me. I screwed up the initial photo import, then tried to “fix” it in the wrong way. This will come back to haunt me later.

Basically, iPhoto takes all of your photos, and imports them into the iPhoto Library, copying all your photos into the library, unless you’ve selected an option in the preferences. So, because of the initial screwed up import, then the accidental duplication, I’d used up all the space on my hard drive. ‘That can’t be right,” I thought.

So, I went about trying to figure out how to get all the duplicates off the drive. “Wipe it all out and reinstall” would have been a great option, except at some point in the process, everything had appeared, momentarily, to be going right, so we imported a bunch of wedding photos off Ei-Nyung’s computer *and then deleted the originals*. Now, yes, this is stupid. Shut up. I already know.

So, we have three sets of photos, and one other. That last one is the last copy of those photos we have, so I *CAN’T DELETE THEM*.

So, I figure, okay, I’ll just go manually through iPhoto’s library, and delete all the duplicates by hand. Great. So, I do that. It takes about four hours.

Tonight, I go to spit out a slideshow in iDVD, and I can’t move some of the photos into the slideshow pane. Why? BECAUSE THEY DON’T FUCKING EXIST ANYMORE.

Here’s the problem. iPhoto creates thumbnails and picture info, and keeps that in some meta thing. They aren’t updated in real-time, so that you can browse through your photos without constantly refreshing everything. Great. But I did the initial delete of the original import I’d f’ed up, the thumbnails were left behind, along with the picture info.

When I went through and deleted all the dupes by hand, I’d checked a few of the groups randomly, and found that the right most photo in the list was good. So I went through the entire library, spot-checking, and deleting all but the right-most photo in the library pane.

Of course, what happened was that for almost every photo that I *didn’t* check by hand, and for NONE of the photos I did, they were the phantom remnants of photos that I’d already deleted. Thumbnails and picture info that didn’t know when to die.

So, now, I’ve gone through the iPhoto library, deleted every goddamn instance of the phantom thumbnails, and re-imported all of our existing photos, while leaving behind all the ones that looked alright.

Now, I’ve gotta go through and redelete a bunch of new duplicates. God, I can’t fucking wait.