Using Lightroom with iPhoto

kilofox

I need iPhoto for its iLife integration. I see that I can point iPhoto at my Lightroom Library and reference it therefore avoid copying photos and thus save drive space.

Will doing this mess up my Lightroom Library in any way? I am hoping the iPhoto will creat it's thumbnails and meta data in its own folder and leave the LR library untouched.

mercphoto

Uncertain about that, but Aperture would have integrated with iLife directly.

kilofox

jlw wrote:

You can't point iPhoto to the actual Lightroom catalog file (which is an SQLite database that stores your Lightroom edit data in Lightroom's proprietary format) but you can point it to the folder where you store the image files that Lightroom manages. If you've unchecked iPhoto's preference to "Copy files to iPhoto Library folder" (under the Advanced pane) it will import the files in place rather than making duplicate copies.

I've referenced iPhoto to images managed by Lightroom this way with no ill effects. If you want to make sure, though, rather than taking the word of some online yutz you don't even know, you could try this:

-- Select a small sample of your Lightroom-managed photos and save that using the "Export as Catalog" option, checking the option to include the original files. This will give you a test catalog and image folder that are completely separate from your Lightroom image collection.

-- Import your test set's image folder into iPhoto and whang away at will.

-- Open the test catalog in Lightroom, examine the images, and verify that they haven't been munged.

This should be a safe procedure because Lightroom stores all your edits in its catalog database, while iPhoto stores the edited versions as separate files. But as I said, you might feel more comfortable testing first.

Note one big drawback of this method: All the cropping, toning, lightening, darkening, etc. that you do in Lightroom will NOT be accessible to iPhoto, because the Lightroom edits are stored in its own private format. You'll need to recreate all those effects in iPhoto to use the edited image in iPhoto-aware applications.

I thought as much.. however your last paragraph takes a little wind out of my sails..... Thanks for the advice.

colourbox

jlw wrote:

Note one big drawback of this method: All the cropping, toning, lightening, darkening, etc. that you do in Lightroom will NOT be accessible to iPhoto, because the Lightroom edits are stored in its own private format. You'll need to recreate all those effects in iPhoto to use the edited image in iPhoto-aware applications.

You might get it to work if you use the not-so-private DNG format and remember to save the Lightroom changes back out to the files so that other apps can read them. But then, I don't know if iPhoto reads DNG.

mlseatwa

jlw wrote:

Nice thought, but I doubt that it would help. Doing it this way stores the Lightroom edit data in the DNG file header, but it's still Lightroom-formatted data. It won't make any sense to iPhoto or any other editing application (except Adobe Camera Raw, which understands the same format.)

I don't think iPhoto really works with any raw files, it converts them to jpg and then works with the jpg. The way I've gotten around this is to use Lightroom export scripts (for example the SmugMug uploader) to create jpg copies on disk and then import those by reference into iPhoto. I do end up with an extra copy, but I only export my selects. I haven't looked at iPhoto 9 yet to see if it handles this situation differently.

Jarvo

jlw wrote:

Note one big drawback of this method: All the cropping, toning, lightening, darkening, etc. that you do in Lightroom will NOT be accessible to iPhoto, because the Lightroom edits are stored in its own private format. You'll need to recreate all those effects in iPhoto to use the edited image in iPhoto-aware applications.

As a slight aside.

Is this the same with Aperture <-> iPhoto?

Like the original poster, I'm looking for a solution to manage my photographs, but also still be able to use iPhoto too.

mercphoto

Jarvo wrote:

As a slight aside.

Is this the same with Aperture <-> iPhoto?

Like the original poster, I'm looking for a solution to manage my photographs, but also still be able to use iPhoto too.

Uncertain about that, but Aperture integrates into iLife directly (web page publishing, creating photo books, uploading images onto my iPod and iPhone, etc.).

BradfordBenn

There might actually be a solution. I did not watch the podcast to know if it will do what is desired here, but it might

http://creativesuitepodcast.com/index.php?post_id=340812

I am a little scared that I remember that there was a podcast from 9 months ago that I did not watch but I remembered:yikes