I am working on a big DVD project chronicling the
Conexus Cathedral project I worked on at Burning Man this year.
I have approximately 900 photos that I intend to include on the DVD both as a video slideshow and as hires originals, and I have been painstakingly working on them in iPhoto correcting and cropping and tweaking away....
And now comes the pain:
1) iDVD has a very nice feature that can automatically include hires originals of photos imported into a movie (or slideshow) project in the DVD ROM portion of the disc. Perfect - exactly what I need. BUT -- It uses the original (meaningless) filename for the photos when doing so - not the photo titles I have assigned in iPhoto. Which filename is more user friendly on a DVD: "First Sunrise :: BM 2006 - Build Week (Tuesday)" or "CIMG3702.JPG". *gargh*
2) I can "export" the entire photo set out of iPhoto and into a directory on my computer, and when exporting I can set the filename to be the iPhoto title and not the original name from the camera. Annoying, but workable. At least the names are right on the disc now. But when I import the photoset into iDVD directly from iPhoto, iDVD takes the iPhoto "title" and allows me to superimpose it on the photos when the slideshow movie plays. That is nice. But if I import photos from a directory, the "title" on all 900 photos is now blank and must be filled in manually. (No way in hell!) The order also seems to be getting scrambled in the process to. (See my rant about modification dates below...)
3) To get around this, I suppose I could first RE-IMPORT the entire photoset back into iPhoto, and then export that set back to iDVD - a massive waste of disk space and a major hassle. But by doing that both the "title" and filename will match, and will presumably survive an export to iDVD. Or, I could create the DVD-ROM portion of the disc with the hires photos manually - avoiding the whole reimportation hassle but making it harder to work on both the DVD-ROM and DVD movie sides of the project simultaneously since changes or renamings in one set will not be carried over to the other...
No matter how you look at it, annoying. This should NOT be this hard... *grumble*
WORSE: Setting aside the issue with filenames - the photos in the directory no matter whether I manually export them from iPhoto or let iDVD manage it all have a date based upon either when they were imported from my camera, or when I last made a modification to them. In other words - the very important and meaningful chronology of the photographs is lost! The building of the Cathedral when viewed in Finder or on a PC is now an out-of-order jumbled mess, rather than a compelling narrative story.
To fix this - I could prepend my meaningful names with ugly numbers that encode order and can be sorted "alphabetically" - such as "06.09.29-10:29:32", a royal pain when 900 photos need to be manually renamed, and ugly on screen particularly as a subtitle...
Or I could try and figure out a way make the file creation or modification date reflect the actual date that the photo was taken - which is what iPhoto displays and what users actually care about.
After way too many hours researching this, I only found two tools that seem capable of this task:
First I found
A Better Finder Attributes - a seemingly powerful program that can (among many other things) batch change a photos creation date to match the actual date taken as recorded in the JPEG EXIF data. You can then make another pass to change the files "modification date" to match the "creation date", since the modification date is the field more typically displayed and sorted on. (Why should this need to be two steps I wonder???)
But - the unregistered version of "A Better Finder Attributes" can only work on 5 photos at a time - not enough to work through my 900 photo set or to even experiment much with on a large scale.
Next I tried
CocoViewX, a freeware image browser that just happens to have tacked on to it some EXIF utilities, including the nice ability to reset the file modification/creation date for batches of photos with one simple click.
BUT: CocoViewX has not been updated in over a year, and it is not a "Universal" binary compiled for Intel so it runs VERY slowly on my MacBookPro. And it has a bug that causes it to crash after processing through 121 files, forcing me to break my project up into smaller batches. (Still better than 5 at a time though for experimenting with getting a workable workflow!)
One final annoyance - the way that CocoViewX modifies the files does NOT show up in Finder until Finder quits and restarts - making it at first look as if the program did nothing. I found another freeware utility called
Nudge that can kick Finder into refreshing its view of a directory - but it seems silly to need a tool to do that.
I do intend to go back and take a closer look
A Better Finder Attributes and its sister program for powerful renaming:
A Better Finder Rename. I think some combination of those two tools should make future photo projects a bit easer.
But - WHY IS THIS SO HARD IN THE FIRST PLACE?!!?
This whole mess is just yet another example of the sorry state of metadata use and management in the computing world. But that is a rant for a different day...
PS: Any best practices suggestions or tips from other photographers is very much appreciated, btw...
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