Relinking photos

[ggpeters]

In the documentation with Reunion 11 it recommends that photos for Reunion not be saved in iPhoto or Photos Library, so I exported them to another location on my MacBook Pro. How do you relink them properly to the new location? I went through the Multimedia relinking exercise but when I click on a person in the family tree, the address for the photo is still in the iPhoto Library??? Help. Thanks.

[theKiwi]

Re: Reunion 11 - Relinking all photos

In the documentation with Reunion 11 it recommends that photos for Reunion not be saved in iPhoto or Photos Library, so I exported them to another location on my MacBook Pro. How do you relink them properly to the new location? I went through the Multimedia relinking exercise but when I click on a person in the family tree, the address for the photo is still in the iPhoto Library??? Help. Thanks.

Go to the Reunion Preferences ------> Multimedia.

There you'll see a place to enter a path to "Never search these locations..."

Add your iPhoto library there should stop that.

Roger

[ggpeters]

Re: Reunion 11 - Relinking all photos

I did that, and I even put my iPhoto library in the Trash, and did the relinking thing again, but when you go to an individual's photos, the description, then says: Trash/iPhoto Library/... and so on, so it is still linked with the iPhoto library, rather than the new location????

[Gregg]

Re: Reunion 11 - Relinking all photos

I want to point out that we are not recommending that anyone do what you are attempting to do.

Your original media files are safely located and properly linked in your iPhoto library. As long as the iPhoto library is on your system your media links will be fine.

Reunion 11 will also maintain a link to any iPhoto media items moved to the new Photos library should the iPhoto library get deleted. Migrating from iPhoto to Photos does not delete your iPhoto library, the old iPhoto library stays in place and is duplicated into the Photos library. You have to delete your iPhoto library yourself and we are not asking anyone to do that.

What have been recommending in recent years is that you do not link to photos in the iPhoto library, primarily because we have no control over what Apple might do to the iPhoto library (see recent discussion about the new Photos app).

With Photos, Reunion will make a copy of dragged media items into your Imported Media Folder. For this reason any warnings we made regarding dragging from iPhoto will not apply to dragging from the new Photos app.

With all that said, on to your question...

Before you do anything, make a .zip archive of your iPhoto library in case you find something missing or something goes wrong. You might also want to make a backup copy of your family file.

I even put my iPhoto library in the Trash, and did the relinking thing again, but when you go to an individual's photos, the description, then says: Trash/iPhoto Library/...

You need to empty the Trash to get rid of the iPhoto library and then repair multimedia links, that should point all the media items to the files exported from iPhoto into your new media folder -- provided that new media files are located in one of your multimedia search folders.

[Bob White]

Re: Reunion 11 - Relinking all photos

The following is an excerpt from Jason Snell's new Photos for Mac which is one of the Take Control series ebooks from the Tidbits folks. On reading this, I'm inclined to not touch the iPhoto library. But I am not a programmer (just a fairly knowledgeable user).

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On import, Photos makes a hard link to all iPhoto media assets in its own library package, using the same directory structure as iPhoto 4. Think of hard links as a cousin of Finder aliases—rather than existing in one place with an alias in a different location, files that are hard linked appear to live in two places at once, but only take up the space of a single file.

4 The libraries say they’re roughly the same size, but in fact, they’re sharing disk space via hard links.

So what happens if you edit one of those files? Something clever, it turns out: if I edit a file from a migrated iPhoto library in Photoshop, that version is altered—but the version in the Photos library is untouched. Basically, the act of modifying a hard-linked file causes the link to break. Now there are two different files, both taking up disk space, liv- ing independently.

For Mac users accustomed to the a-file- is-a-file approach of the Finder, this one’s a bit of a head-scratcher, but it’s
a smart move by Apple to allow us to migrate to Photos without duplicating an entire library and eating all of our free disk space—or worse, never bother- ing to upgrade to Photos because we don’t have the room.