Barry Smyth’s Blog

I am sitting in the Qantas Club at Sydney International Airport waiting to board my flight to San Francisco for my trip to SMX West in Santa Clara.

While sitting here I have started doing some custom wok on my new blog theme and it is not as easy as advertised, as usual.

I have been eagerly awaiting the release of iLife ‘09 ever since the Keynote at Macworld a few weeks ago. Mainly because of iPhoto and iMovie as these are apps that I use a lot on my personal Mac.

I also do a lot of photography at my Search Marketing events like SMX Sydney, SMX Singapore & Search Engine Bootcamp, of course all the speakers want to see the photos so its makes sense to stick them up on Social media sites like Facebook, Flickr & Picassa, although I have not yet used Picassa and strangely iPhoto ‘09 does not support it. I say strangely because Google Maps is central to the new iPhoto ‘09 feature called “Places”, more about that later.

SO anyway, I installed iLife ‘09 today and hit my first issue.

My Macbook Pro that I use for work does not have all the conference photography on it anymore as I ran out of space on my hard drive, a few months ago I uploaded all of conference shots to Flickr, then moved them to an external back up hard drive and deleted them from the Mac - space saved and happy Barry.

Along comes iPhoto ‘09 with all its whizz bang features that i want to use and I cant, why? Because all my conference shots are on Flickr, compelte with keywords, tags and comments.

So this is a big issue for me as i want to ultimately control everything from the Mac Book Pro rather than online at Flickr.

So I scoured the forum looking for a solution and i found one, only problem was it is an article that was originally written in French, now I know how to order a beer in Paris and get direction to the Rugby grounds but that’s about it, so I used a translation site and got a passable set of instructions, here is an example of some of the translated text.

“The division before was very thought to send and divide photographs, but it is however not envisaged to be able to synchronize already existing albums on Flickr. This article shows you how to recover the photographs that you would have already put on line on Flickr, as well as the key words that you associated there”

I think it means that iPhoto ‘09 allows you to divide you photos into events and upload them to Flickr, but it does not allow you to sync any current Flickr Sets. these instruction will help you learn how to recover your Flickr Sets with all the keywords intact.

So here Part 1of my step by step instructions.

1. Create a new Event using an image that you don’t mind loosing later on.

2. Once you create the Event select the photo and click the new Flickr button on the bottom right hand side iPhoto ‘09

3. Make sure you select “actual Size” in the Photo Size drop down.

4. You will see that it is uploading as a new indicator on the left hand side of the screen shows you the upload progress, do not do anything in iPhoto while this is happening, previous plug-ins in iPhoto that did this tended to crash if too much was going on and I have not had the chance to play with this new version, so safety first.

5. Login to your Flickr Account and select “Organize”

6. By default you should be in “Batch Orginize”  - Now select the Flickr Set that you want to sync back as an iPhoto Album

7. Highlight the shots you want

8. Drag them up into the grey batching area (cant think of a better word for this)

9. Click on the “Add to Set” drop down and the shots to an existing set

10. A popup will appear, click the one you originally created in iPhoto and then click “Open Set”, the photos are now added to that set

11. Go back to iPhoto ‘09 and you will see that it will sync with Flickr. It takes a little time to do the first sync as it is downloading Hi-Res shots.

This is a time consuming process but at least you have all your photography syncing in one place.

Part 2 will deal with getting the naming structure right across both iPhoto’09 and Flickr.

I’m a big Apple fan, I use a Macbook Pro, Mac Mini & an iPhone 3g. However, I can see the funny side of anything that people write about Mac users, we can be a very odd bunch when it comes to embracing anything Apple, so this Onion News Network video which I first saw on the Singapore Web Wednesday site cracked me up.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

I am testing a new theme that will hopefully form the base for our new search news site - Search Week.