Manage iPhoto event from Lightroom

adobe-lightroomiphoto

I have a dream!

I wish I could import my photos in Lightroom, process them and add them to several different collections/published collections that would then show up as events in iPhoto. Think "Italy 2009", "Wedding", "The Children" and so on.

I can get part of the way today but some very important steps remain to solve.

  1. I import my photos into Lightroom
  2. I organize and edit them into published collections
  3. I publish the collection to disk
  4. I import it into iPhoto and I have very nice event that I can sync with my iOS devices

Here is what I can't do after this step

  1. Edit an image and re-publish and have iPhoto replace it's version with the new one (if possible really replace it so that metadata like faces and locations remains)
  2. Delete an image from the collection and have it removed from iPhoto, including all original/master copies. I have my original i Lightroom so unless it's a part of a currently published collection it shouldn't be in iPhoto. At all.
  3. Have the (temporary) directory removed. I don't need to store this image in more places, Lightroom and iPhoto is enough.

So I guess the question is: can anyone solve any of my 3 problems or improve on the overall workflow?

Best Answer

While it is far from an ideal solution, when I want to put the Lightroom-created JPEGs in iPhoto, I've been using the following to solve #1:

  1. Publish to a Hard Drive folder from Lightroom, each folder named according to the events I want them to have in iPhoto
  2. Uncheck the "Copy Items to the iPhoto Library" box in iPhoto's Preferences>Advanced menu
  3. Import the folders to iPhoto

This will import these pictures by reference only; all the photos stay in their existing folder. (I usually re-check the box afterwards, so later pictures from sources other than Lightroom are actually copied). But you can set all the usually iPhoto metadata, reorganize into different events, browse thumbnails, etc.

If you modify anything in Lightroom, and republish the changes, those changes will be visible immediately when you open the picture in iPhoto. Note however, that unfortunately iPhoto does not update the thumbnail. And iPhoto uses the thumbnail for the zooming-in animation. So not only when you view it in the event display, but for a moment in the zoom-in animation, you will see the original version. But on the plus side, any metadata changes that you make will be preserved, because iPhoto stores these in the database. Only the image is external.

Also, since I don't like having another folder outside of the iPhoto database, I actually have Lightroom publish to a folder that is within the iPhoto database package. iPhoto doesn't delete anything in there that it didn't originally create, as far as I can tell. I have tried to use the "repair library" option to see if it can pull in the files (it claims to be able to recover orphans), but no luck there.

Unfortunately, iPhoto does not check when the files are removed. So it doesn't solve #2. It sort of solves #3, in that there is no additional copy.

Anyways, like I said, it's a very imperfect solution, but I've found it to work reasonably well for myself, and it's the best that I've come up with. There is a plugin that purports to be a Lightroom Publish Service for iPhoto, but it doesn't work at all (it's basically an export; it doesn't update photos).

Best of luck!

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