I’m looking forward to Apple’s OS X Lion upgrade that was released today.  I’m hoping to breathe some life back into my MacBook Pro by doing a clean install and then just importing and installing only the things I need as I need them.  In investigating what was using up the majority of my hard drive space I discovered that my iPhoto library was using up 24 GBs of space.

24 GB!  That was shocking to me as I don’t take that many pictures.  What I’ve determined is that over the years of iPhoto upgrades my library has collected a lot of cruft.  Thumbnails, iPod Sync Versions, Originals and who knows what else seem to be using up a ton of space.

It is possible to get into the guts of an iPhoto library and try to manually remove junk like the above, however, you are almost guaranteed to screw something up and I would recommend to just avoid this idea altogether.

My solution instead, was to export all my photos, wipe out my existing library and create a new one from scratch.  I was able to reduce my library down to about 11 GB.  That’s a 13 GB savings in space with the loss of any photos!  Below are the steps to do this.

1. Re-Title All the Photos in Your Library

The first frustrating thing about iPhoto’s export functionality is that it does not have an option to export your Events in bulk to corresponding folders.  If it did, this tutorial would be 2 steps.  Instead, I had to export all my photos into one folder and then use a script to file them into folders correctly based on their filename.

To get the filenames consistent, first select all of your events, and from the “Photos” menu choose “Batch Change…”.  Then tell it to “Set Title to Event Name”.

This will update the titles for all your photos to look something like “My Event – 0001″.

2. Export All Photos to a Folder

Create a folder somewhere in your system to export everything to.  I created a folder called “Photos_Current” in my Downloads folder.  Now, again, select all your events and from the “File” menu, choose “Export…”.

From the “File Export” tab we have a decision to make.  When you modify a photo in iPhoto it keeps the original version as well as the updated version.  This is nice if you ever want to roll back an image, but not nice if you are looking to clean up some space.  For me, I assume that if I modified a photo, say I cropped it down, straightened it or removed red-eye, the current one is the one I really care about.  If you prefer the original version then that’s fine to, it means you can skip step 2b below.

So next I set the “Kind” to “Current” and the “File Name” to “Use title”.

This export might take a bit of time depending on the size of your library.

2b. 

This step is optional, if you chose to export Original instead of Current in the previous step, or you do not have any videos in your library, you can move on to step 3.

When exporting Current iPhoto does not properly export videos.  They show up as single frame files rather than full videos.  To correct this, we have to do another export similar to the above, but choosing “Original” and exporting that into a different folder.

Once that export is complete, you will need to manually copy the video files (could be of many types, MOV, MPG, AVI, MP4, etc…) into the first export.  Once those are copied over, you can delete the rest of the second export.

3. Trash Your Old Library

Again, make sure you have a backup, but if you do, go ahead and close iPhoto and delete your library.  Usually this is called “iPhoto Library” in your “Pictures” folder.

4. Organize Your Photos Into Foldres

So at this point we have one folder with all our files export named after the Events they were a part of.  This is where things require a bit of technical know-how.  Luckily for us, someone out there has already written a script to do just that.

You can follow the instructions at http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20081108132735425 to learn how to run this script.

Once it is complete, you should now have a series of folders named the same as your original Events.

5. Create a New iPhoto Library

Open iPhoto.  Its going to complain about a missing library (remember we deleted it).  Just choose “Create New” and you can create a new “iPhoto Library” wherever you want, though I suggest just putting it back in the “Pictures Folder”

6. Import Your Photos Back In

This step is easy, just select all the folders that were created by the script, and drag them into iPhoto.  It will automatically being the import process and when it is done, you will see that it has turned all the folders back into Events.

And that’s it.  Not too bad and you get a huge space savings, or at least I did.

- Greg Martin

]]> https://slalomdev.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/how-to-drastically-reduce-an-overgrown-iphoto-library-by-starting-from-scratch/feed/ 1 Greg Martin Set Title to Event Name Export https://slalomdev.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/how-i-stay-organized/ https://slalomdev.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/how-i-stay-organized/#comments Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:39:00 +0000 Greg Martin http://slalomdev.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/how-i-stay-organized ]]> >I’ve always been a very organized person.  Though my habits for staying organized change rather frequently.  In grade school I recall cycling through a single divided notebook to a pee-chee for every class to a notebook for every class and back again.  College was no different.  One year, small 5×7 notebooks, color coded for each class to easily be able to grab them out of my bag (yeah, I know, huge dork, it doesn’t get any better…) to a meticulously organized binder with schedules I’d print out daily to manage my class and work schedules to spending way more money than I had on a Handspring Visor PDA (yeah, I was that guy and it was awesome).

Without giving away too much detail, one of my current client projects is a pretty cool combination of technologies.  We are building an iPhone application with Amazon Web Services back-end.  As we’ve been building this it has occurred to me how many of my ideas in the past died because we would get bogged down in the details about where and how we were going to host it rather than just building it.

It’s thrilling to see all these cloud computing services springing up that really level the playing field for anyone with an idea to deploy, and more importantly scale if they find success.

I still don’t have that one great idea, but I feel like the roadblocks that existed in years past have lessened.

Honorable Mentions…

As it turns out, this is really easy to do using peer-to-peer wireless networking, enabling applications like AirSharing or the Apple Remote to connect to your machine regardless of if there is an available wireless network.

Note: This can be done on Windows as well, however, I will only be covering the process on a Mac.

1. First you need to create a new network on your Mac by selecting your AirPort menu item and choosing “Create Network…”.
   
2. Choose a name for your network, and optionally require a password (I would suggest adding a password to restrict access to your machine).
   
3. On your iPhone, tap Setttings then Wi-Fi.
   
4. Your phone should find the network you just created, tap it and enter your password if you chose to set one up.
   
5. Now open AirSharing.
   
6. Back on your Mac, from the Finder menu, select “Connect to Server…” (this can also be opened by pressing Command+K on your keyboard).
   
7. Enter the address specified by AirSharing for connecting and click “Connect”.
   
8. A finder window will open with the AirSharing share and a mounted disk will appear on your desktop.
   
   

As I mentioned above, this tip is not limited to the AirSharing application.  Any iPhone application that uses wireless connectivity to interface with your machine, such as the Apple Remote, should work with this method.

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I’ve been using the ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider to allow my users to login to a custom ASP.Net site with their AD credentials and it is pretty straight forward. Recently I needed to add more granularity to who can view various parts of the site. I wanted to take advantage of our existing AD groups so I assumed there would be something like an ActiveDirectoryRoleProvider as well. After a little searching, it became clear that wasn’t the case, so I decided to roll my own.

Creating a custom role provider is pretty easy, all you have to do is create a new class and inherit RoleProvider:

public class ActiveDirectoryRoleProvider : RoleProvider{}

You will have to create stubs for all the inherited members. We only need to implement a couple of them to get basic role membership checking. We need to get our AD configuration information out of the Web.Config values, so we’ll create a few properties and override the Initialize method:

private string ConnectionStringName { get; set; }private string ConnectionUsername { get; set; }private string ConnectionPassword { get; set; }private string AttributeMapUsername { get; set; }

public override void Initialize(string name, NameValueCollection config){    ConnectionStringName = config["connectionStringName"];    ConnectionUsername = config["connectionUsername"];    ConnectionPassword = config["connectionPassword"];    AttributeMapUsername = config["attributeMapUsername"];

    base.Initialize(name, config);}

Now we’ll override GetRolesForUser which is the bulk of our implementation. We use the DirectorySearcher class in System.DirectoryServices to query AD for the passed username. We then pull the memberOf property from that user and extract the CN component for each entry as the role:

public override string[] GetRolesForUser(string username){    var allRoles = new List<string>();

    var root = new DirectoryEntry(WebConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings[ConnectionStringName].ConnectionString, ConnectionUsername, ConnectionPassword);

    var searcher = new DirectorySearcher(root, string.Format(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, "(&(objectClass=user)({0}={1}))", AttributeMapUsername, username));    searcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add("memberOf");

    SearchResult result = searcher.FindOne();

    if (result != null && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(result.Path))    {        DirectoryEntry user = result.GetDirectoryEntry();

        PropertyValueCollection groups = user.Properties["memberOf"];

        foreach (string path in groups)        {            string[] parts = path.Split(',');

            if (parts.Length > 0)            {                foreach (string part in parts)                {                    string[] p = part.Split('=');

                    if (p[0].Equals("cn", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))                    {                        allRoles.Add(p[1]);                    }                }            }        }    }

    return allRoles.ToArray();}

And finally we need to override IsUserInRole so we can easily check for role membership in code:

public override bool IsUserInRole(string username, string roleName){    string[] roles = GetRolesForUser(username);

    foreach (string role in roles)    {        if (role.Equals(roleName, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))        {            return true;        }    }

    return false;}

Here’s the the full code (minus the unimplemented inherited methods):

public class ActiveDirectoryRoleProvider : RoleProvider{    private string ConnectionStringName { get; set; }    private string ConnectionUsername { get; set; }    private string ConnectionPassword { get; set; }    private string AttributeMapUsername { get; set; }

    public override void Initialize(string name, NameValueCollection config)    {        ConnectionStringName = config["connectionStringName"];        ConnectionUsername = config["connectionUsername"];        ConnectionPassword = config["connectionPassword"];        AttributeMapUsername = config["attributeMapUsername"];

        base.Initialize(name, config);    }

    public override bool IsUserInRole(string username, string roleName)    {        string[] roles = GetRolesForUser(username);

        foreach (string role in roles)        {            if (role.Equals(roleName, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))            {                return true;            }        }

        return false;    }

    public override string[] GetRolesForUser(string username)    {        var allRoles = new List<string>();

        var root = new DirectoryEntry(WebConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings[ConnectionStringName].ConnectionString, ConnectionUsername, ConnectionPassword);

        var searcher = new DirectorySearcher(root, string.Format(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, "(&(objectClass=user)({0}={1}))", AttributeMapUsername, username));        searcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add("memberOf");

        SearchResult result = searcher.FindOne();

        if (result != null && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(result.Path))        {            DirectoryEntry user = result.GetDirectoryEntry();

            PropertyValueCollection groups = user.Properties["memberOf"];

            foreach (string path in groups)            {                string[] parts = path.Split(',');

                if (parts.Length > 0)                {                    foreach (string part in parts)                    {                        string[] p = part.Split('=');

                        if (p[0].Equals("cn", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))                        {                            allRoles.Add(p[1]);                        }                    }                }            }        }

        return allRoles.ToArray();    }}

Add the role provider to your Web.Config:

<system.web>    <roleManager enabled="true" defaultProvider="ADRoleProvider" cacheRolesInCookie="true" cookieName=".ASPXROLES" cookiePath="/"                 cookieTimeout="30" cookieRequireSSL="false" cookieSlidingExpiration="true" createPersistentCookie="false" cookieProtection="All">        <providers>            <clear />            <add name="ActiveDirectoryRoleProvider" connectionStringName="ADConnectionString" connectionUsername="username"                 connectionPassword="password" attributeMapUsername="sAMAccountName" type="ActiveDirectoryRoleProvider" />        </providers>    </roleManager></system.web>

You can then check the roles of your user in code like so:

Roles.IsUserInRole("My Group")

Or control access to entire directories via the Web.Config:

<location path="RestrictedSubDirectory">    <system.web>        <authorization>            <allow roles="My Group"/>            <deny users="*" />        </authorization>    </system.web></location>