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Comment by revscat | Hacker News Reader

> My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction iPhoto decided to enforce upon me. After removing iPhoto, it was bearable.

This makes no sense. iPhoto stores your photos in a directory structure on your system. This directory is like any other. If you want to extract the photos from them you can. You can also just right-click on your photos from within iPhoto and extract them.

> After removing iPhoto, it was bearable.

What was bearable? Why didn't you try and fix the problem? I've been using iPhoto for almost 10 years, across ~6 different machines, and have never had any issues with it.

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It was unbearable because the abstraction was inconsistent when it came to:

a) talking to the library from the command line - the mapping between the UI and the filesystem was completely abstract.

b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent.

c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at.

Bearable was removing iPhoto and installing Nikon ViewNX which came with my D70. This has no abstraction - the filesystem is the abstraction.

(I know how to access the source files BTW).

> a) talking to the library from the command line - the mapping between the UI and the filesystem was completely abstract.

So... doing "find . -type f -name '*.jpg' -print" is outside of your capabilities?

> b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent.

What were you trying to do?

> c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at.

man mdls

So... doing "find . -type f -name '.jpg' -print" is outside of your capabilities?*

No but doing that when iPhoto stores backups of your images is a pain in the arse.

b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent

Automator + Photoshop.

> c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at.

Yes but that doesn't deal with folders which aren't indexed. For example if you do an iPhoto import it can lag for a while before Spotlight catches up. Bang - synchronisation problem.

This shot me badly.

The whole solution is just bad.

> No but doing that when iPhoto stores backups of your images is a pain in the arse.

In what way?

> Yes but that doesn't deal with folders which aren't indexed. For example if you do an iPhoto import it can lag for a while before Spotlight catches up. Bang - synchronisation problem.

Moving goalposts. First you said the metadata was opaque. It wasn't. Now you're saying there is lag.

What were you trying to do? I do a lot of photography, and while I am no means a pro -- or even a semi-pro -- I have done automator scripts against iPhoto with zero problems. You still haven't said what you were trying to accomplish.

The problem is, you're moving the goalposts too. "It just works" wouldn't apply if you need to hack together automater script...

Pain in the arse because there is no easy eay of determining which was the master. Instead of a hierarchy, you have a hierarchy with a temporal aspect as well poorly mapped to a non temporal hierarchy.

The metadata is still not opaque (its not stored with the files making backup/restore hard) and it lags meaning its potentially somewhere between ok and useless at any point in time.

Watermark, thumbnail, rename, move to a directory outside iPhoto, run a gallery script. Hell.

I ended up with ViewNX which has no abstraction and a python script using PIL instead of automator. Neither of which leverage any advantage that OSX portrays. In fact I could do the same thing on any platform.

I have had run ins with iPhoto as well, sorry but if I cannot quickly locate my pictures in Finder something is wrong.

Who should have to go to a command line and run old school commands to find something they can clearly see otherwise using an app provided by the maker of the machine and OS?

I did the right click show in finder to find that directory for my photos and honestly could not determine how I would have gotten there in Finder starting at the top.

I really enjoy OS X but at times it can be downright annoying, annoying as in "If Microsoft makes doing "X" easy why is it so damn hard here"

It's sometimes not intuitive that some directories on Mac look like packages.

Sometimes you just need to right-click View Package Contents to access the directory, and I'm sure that tiny fence solves many many support headaches for 99% of users.

If you know the difference between a package and a directory then you should probably know enough to right click.

That's pretty minor.

Yes and that isn't actually the problem I had :)

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