Hiya paolo

A timely heads-up many thanks, but I'm not sure you are absolutely 
right on that.

At 11:47 PM +0100 20/12/10, paolo savonuzzi wrote:

>... a (ehm... cough-cough) photographer writing, here: Geoff you are 
>aware that, if your images are jpgs, iPhoto is the last "tool" on 
>earth you should use, right? ;-)
>
>it is indeed a very practical and easy tool for *storing and 
>organizing* (smaller: meaning not my raw originals ;-) images and, 
>being somehow "part of Mac OS", many third party apps (RapidWeaver, 
>to say one) are able to pick what one needs directly from its 
>Library but...
>
>... every single time you "edit" an image (... not sure if this has 
>been addressed in latest versions: also auto-rotating a portrait 
>format image during first import is considered *editing* by iPhoto) 
>iPhoto recompresses it at every single step.
>this simply means, as jpg is a lossy format, your pictures are 
>loosing quality at every single editing step!

I just tested it (my version is v.8.1.4, i.e. the 2010 edition) and I 
think you might be overstating the case a bit.

1. ROTATING PIX THROUGH 90 DEGREES:

Doing this manually does not change the size of the picture, so it is 
not saving and reducing size. it would be odd if the automatic 
feature was different. I wonder whether this is something that has 
been addressed by Apple since you last checked (in horror).

2.  COMPRESSING WHEN EDITING -- ONLY ONCE PER SESSION:

Now let me make things clear -- my photos come out of the camera and 
are stored as Fine JPEGs in the first place. Looking at the saved 
sizes of the images, it appears to me that only one compression is 
taking place -- at the end of the session when you hit the "Done" 
button. iPhoto saves then and takes a moment doing it, so that is 
pretty obvious. If it compressed the image at every move, you would 
be able to detect it doing this and the final image would be much 
smaller. To test this, I just took an original image, corrected the 
horizontal a bit, then saved. Down from 3.4 MB to 1.7 MB. Then I took 
the same original, did the same horizontal correction, then broadened 
the dynamic range, opened up the shadows a bit, and sharpened it a 
bit. Saved ("done") again and the new size was 2.1 MB. Clearly it did 
not compress behind the scenes to 1.7 MB, then compress again with 
each change. It only did one compression -- when I saved it.

Having said that, it must be said that iPhoto's compression appears 
to be pretty savage. Yes, to compress or not should be a user defined 
option. Maybe they could set it to compress by default (heaven knows, 
it might reduce the number of giant images floating around the 
internet), but allow it to be turned off, or a high quality level to 
be selected by the user.

This is one of the good things about Canvas, actually. It has a fine 
JPEG engine which can be told not to compress if you wish.

>:-/
>(sure... digging somewhere inside iPhoto's library you can recover 
>your originals but... all your editing will be lost)

3.  ORIGINAL IMAGES

Just select your image in the iPhoto thumbnails view, then go to menu 
bar > photos > revert to original (the last item in that menu).  ;-)

>so... if editing is what you need... consider, if not LightRoom, Aperture ;-)


editing I do is pretty simple -- I don't need or want the extensive 
tools available. I would rather spend the money on multiple 
caipirinhas. Or as a second choice, gin and tonics! :D

Cheers, geoff