IPhoto Bloat
After I import a photo into IPhoto, I frequently do a quick edit - usually just enhancing shadows, exposure, maybe a crop or colour adjustments. Once I am done, I pretty much never want the original and rarely want a large image larger than IPhoto’s medium export size unless I have some reason to believe I will enlarge the photo beyond 8″ x 10″. As a result, the IPhoto database is about 30 times larger than I need because of excess image quality - that is a lot of digital clutter to manage.
The only reason I shoot at a high resolution on the SLR at all is because I will do some editing and cropping, and the results are better if I crop a high resolution image than a low one. But in the end I desire a 200K image, not a 2MByte or 3MByte image. Often I will shoot medium size/medium quality if I know I won’t be doing a lot of cropping.
The disk storage becomes an issue, not because disk space itself is expensive, but because it gets hard to back up, and time consuming to upload to flickr, with larger image sizes. And expensive on Amazon S3.
I would like IPhoto to have an option to “Shrink” the current image to a target file size (i.e. 300K) as one of the edit features. I would also like a “review edited photos” which lets me look at photos that have not been edited recently, and to replace the original with the edited photo, keeping all albums, keywords, and other metadata intact.
The shrink feature might as well save in Jpeg2000 as well.
September 6th, 2009 at 10:32 am
[...] if only there were a way to eliminate originals after editing, downsizing (and preferably converting to jpeg2000) after editing, all would be [...]