TNR Tip: revert to original in iPhoto
Apple iPhoto
Use iPhoto? Make an edit on a picture and no longer like it? Did you know that you can bring the original picture back with just one click? Read on to find out how!iPhoto ‘08 has a nifty feature called “Revert to Original.” It’s purpose is simple: undo all edits you made to a picture and voilla – you have your original shot, just as it came off your camera! This feature is a bit difficult to find (you’d think Apple would make it more prominent). Here’s where you can get at it:
What iPhoto does is pretty clever (for whoever thought this up): once you make any changes to a photo, the software makes a copy of the original photo and makes all edits on the copy. Therefore, you always have an original version of any picture in your iPhoto library. You just don’t see it.
I’m not sure whether other versions of iPhoto have this feature. As far as I know, iPhoto ‘08 is the first iPhoto to use this and I’m sure ‘09 has it as well. I haven’t played around with ‘09 yet, but I hope that this feature is more prominent and easier to find.
So now you can be calm that you won’t “mess up” that precious picture of you next to Jamie Foxx.
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Full disclosure: Alex Luft owns a very small amount of shares in Apple, Inc.
Posted in TNR tip7 comments to “TNR Tip: revert to original in iPhoto”
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25. February 2009 at 6:51 pm :
I’m finding with iPhoto 08 that reverting to an original doesn’t work, at least for me. Before I realized that iPhoto has the very, very bad behavior of re-encoding images when rotated (which can usually be done loselessly, if only it would bother) I rotated a bunch of photos. Now I have both the originals and the rotated, re-encoded copies on disk, eating space. When I select one such image and revert to original, the copy under ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Modified/2008/ disappears briefly, but after a few minutes silently reappears! If I manually rm the modified files then try to inspect one in iPhoto, it displays a gray !. If I again tell iPhoto to revert to the original, it appears to do so in the browser, but again after some minutes the Modified copy appears again on disk with a current timestamp.
I’m pretty much stumped here. I want to revert all of the rotated images back to their originals to minimize generational loss and superfluous disk space. I understand now that Aperture gets this right, but
A) It won’t run on my G5
B) I don’t want to import the modified copies into Aperture, only the originals.
Any thoughts? My best guess so far is to copy out the /Originals/ files then delete the whole album in iPhoto and re-import.
25. February 2009 at 9:09 pm :
Hey Anthony, that sucks to hear that you’re having trouble with it. I haven’t even run into anything of the sort but here is what I though up:
Just to be sure me and my small brain are understanding this correctly, let me retort to you what you described is occurring:
1. You import picture A into iPhoto. This file becomes File A in iPhoto’s library in the Originals folder.
2. You then rotate Picture A 90 degrees.
3. iPhoto creates a new file (File B) in the Modified directory for this newly rotated picture (let’s call it picture A-rotated). In other words, once you rotate the original picture A, iPhoto duplicates file A in the iPhoto library, which makes file B under the Modified folder.
Is that what it’s doing?
I’m pretty sure that the reason iPhoto hangs on to the original file and modified file is that that is the way it is able to accomplish the “revert back to original” function. In essence, iPhoto treats the rotation of the file as a “modification.” And now I see how much of an issue this can become in regards to disk space, especially if you shoot in RAW or any other file format that produces pictures of huge size. And even if that is not the case, it’s simply an inefficient solution: you can always rotate a photo,, so it doesn’t really make any sense to keep an “original” version.
Perhaps this has been resolved in iLife ‘09? I wouldn’t know, as I don’t have it yet. I should be getting ‘09 soon so I will let you know how it treats rotated images.
Here are some things you can try when importing new pictures:
1) After reverting back to original, try emptying iPhoto trash. Not Mac OS Trash, but the one in iPhoto. If that doesn’t work, the following is a much less elegant solution that iPhoto provides, but it works:
2) When importing pictures, don’t import into iPhoto right away. Instead, drag the contents of your camera’s card to the desktop/a location on your Mac. Then, Command-A all files and open with Preview. You can batch-rotate the pictures in Preview to your liking. Once you have finished doing that, import into iPhoto: you now don’t have to rotate in iPhoto, thus eliminating the creation of a duplicate picture in the Modified directory.
3) You can apply #2 to your Originals directory before migrating to Aperture.
Do you know why Aperture won’t run on your G5? I checked the minimum system requirements on Apple’s site (http://www.apple.com/aperture/specs/) and it runs on PowerPC Macs.
Let me know if any of that makes sense and/or helps.
-Alex
PS: another thing that nags me in iPhoto is that it doesn’t let me export my pictures in any simple way. I mean the button is there under the File menu, but when I try to export any files, iPhoto doesn’t export originals, but exports some kind of encoded bull. I know this because it takes time for it to export even the smallest amount of pictures… what’s it crunching/compressing? Just give me my fracking pictures! Oh, and I’d recommend to switching to Picasa for Mac but it’s Intel-only
26. February 2009 at 1:41 pm :
I’m not talking about the lossy rotation, though that bug is annoying enough. I’m talking about reverting to original not working. When I select an imported photo and rotate it, it creates a Modified/ re-encoded copy as expected. When I select that photo again and invoke Revert to Original from the menu, the Modified/ file briefly disappears from disk, but the thumbnail displayed by the iPhoto browser doesn’t revert, and within a minute or so the Modified/ copy returns:
aad% ls -l ~/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library/*/2008/London\ 3:16-20:2008/IMG_6355.JPG
-rw-r–r–@ 1 aad aad 68062 Feb 26 10:24 /Users/aad/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Data/2008/London 3:16-20:2008/IMG_6355.JPG
-rw-r–r–@ 1 aad aad 1152867 Feb 26 10:25 /Users/aad/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Modified/2008/London 3:16-20:2008/IMG_6355.JPG
-rw-r–r–@ 1 aad aad 896594 Mar 18 2008 /Users/aad/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Originals/2008/London 3:16-20:2008/IMG_6355.JPG
aad% ls -l ~/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library/*/2008/London\ 3:16-20:2008/IMG_6355.JPG
-rw-r–r–@ 1 aad aad 68062 Feb 26 10:31 /Users/aad/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Data/2008/London 3:16-20:2008/IMG_6355.JPG
-rw-r–r–@ 1 aad aad 896594 Mar 18 2008 /Users/aad/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Originals/2008/London 3:16-20:2008/IMG_6355.JPG
aad% ls -l ~/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library/*/2008/London\ 3:16-20:2008/IMG_6355.JPG
-rw-r–r–@ 1 aad aad 68062 Feb 26 10:31 /Users/aad/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Data/2008/London 3:16-20:2008/IMG_6355.JPG
-rw-r–r–@ 1 aad aad 1152867 Feb 26 10:32 /Users/aad/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Modified/2008/London 3:16-20:2008/IMG_6355.JPG
-rw-r–r–@ 1 aad aad 896594 Mar 18 2008 /Users/aad/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Originals/2008/London 3:16-20:2008/IMG_6355.JPG
At no time does the Revert to Original choice disappear from the menus, so clearly iPhoto doesn’t even think it’s accomplished the reversion.
I can’t empty the iPhoto trash because it’s empty.
The way that iPhoto does rotation, by re-encoding (at least for JPEG/JFIF) is insane. These sorts of photos can be rotated losslessly,but iPhoto doesn’t do that. Since it re-encodes, rotation is a lossy operation, and rotating back doesn’t get you the original image, but rather a second generation copy.
I never import straight into iPhoto because it’s incredibly slow. Image Capture takes maybe 20 seconds to grab thumbnails off my CF card and come ready for action. iPhoto on the same card takes several hours and there doesn’t seem to be a way to tell it not to glom onto a card when inserted, so I’ve taken to killing off iPhoto when importing. I loose the EXIF 2.1 info this way, but I guess that’s the price of tolerable responsiveness.
Preview, in my tests, also does lossy rotation. There are freeware utilities out there that rotate properly — I need to look into them. I used to have my camera set the rotation flag on photos, but software support for that is so spotty that I’ve given up.
Aperture says that it won’t run on my G5 because my graphics card isn’t good enough. I find this hard to believe, but I guess Apple has to sell new hardware.
I may just switch over to using my MBP for photos and laboriously re-import them into Aperture.
26. February 2009 at 2:12 pm :
Wow, I’m stumped. I tested it out with my own iPhoto library and the thumbnail reverts to original just fine. Let me do some research.
If you’re set on switching, you should try out Picasa on your MBP before going with Aperture. Picasa doesn’t have the same lossy BS that iPhoto has.
-Alex
30. April 2009 at 5:53 pm :
I believe that disabling the insertion of a ColorSync profile upon import avoids the bizarre behavior I reported.
3. May 2009 at 11:37 pm :
Awesome – great find! How did you figure it out?
How would one remove the ColorSync profile during import?
-Alex
4. May 2009 at 1:23 am :
I eliminated any other change that it could be making, and realized that I should test the colorsync thing.
I’m now not removing the profile during import, but rather just ignoring it. There’s a preference for applying a profile during import that I turned on innocently when I first started playing with iPhoto. I forgot about it until recently. Once I disabled that, no more needless re-encoding was observed.
I use Image Capture to suck photos off my cards then drag the files into iPhoto. I’ve found that iPhoto when presented with a 4GB card full of JPGs wedges for over an hour generating thumbnails, plus I now use A Better Finder Rename before sucking into iPhoto. Aperture or Lightroom seem increasingly appealing.