iPhoto '11 nightmare

My nightmare in getting rid of iPhoto '11 and downgrading to iPhoto '09 lasted 48 hours. What's wrong with iPhoto '11? Plenty of things! Here's a little list:

• Slow. iPhoto '11 is slower by a few orders of magnitude as compared to iPhoto '09. Speed of response is just unacceptable.
• Complex paths to simple operations. In iPhoto '09, I used to be able to edit event names, album names, descriptions very easily, with a single click. Not so anymore. The information window in iPhoto '11 is just clumsy and non-intuitive.
• Places. This is a killer, and this is what prompted me to downgrade. I don't own a GPS enabled camera. I tend to manually enter location information by dropping a pin on the map. This used to be very simple. Click on the information icon on the photo, search for your place and drop the pin. Now what we have is a tiny rectangle in the information window and a clumsy method to drop a pin. It is frustratingly impossible to accurately pinpoint your location. Also, there's a bug which causes duplicate letters to appear when typing for a place name!

My nightmare:

My TimeMachine disk had failed. I had to re-format it after I upgraded to iPhoto '11. There was no possibility of a rollback.

The solution:

Initially, I tried iPhoto Library Manager. This is a wonderful piece of work, thought out meticulously by someone who understands the needs of proper photo management. While it is aimed at merging and splitting multiple iPhoto libraries, I used it for its "Rebuild Library" feature. iPLM can rebuild a photo library based on all the metadata it can find.

To rebuild your library:

• Delete iPhoto '11
• Install iPhoto '09
• Apply the software updates to iPhoto '09 (I had to apply two updates)
• Install iPhoto Library Manager
• Open iPhoto Library Manager, select your default photo library and hit Rebuild Library.
• iPhoto will be launched by iPLM and you will see your photos being imported and metadata being applied.
• Wait for a long time. My 45000 photos took 30 hours to import and fall in place.

After iPLM finished its job, I had a properly rebuilt iPhoto library, except I lost all my geo-tagging data. iPLM is still unable to read and apply Places data from the new library. I believe future updates of iPLM will make this possible, but as of this writing, this isn't the case.

I had geo-tagged a lot of photos. Losing my geographical data was unacceptable. Luckily, I maintain a second backup of all my photos - slightly less frequently than TimeMachine. I use rsync to backup my photos to another hard disk. Restoring from this backup would mean losing the last three months worth of photographs.

My next step was to export the last three months' photos to another folder, delete the iPhoto library, restore from my rsync backup and re-import the photos from the last three months. I had to re-tag and re-apply some of the metadata, but it is easier to do so for three months worth of photos than re-applying geo-tags for the entire library.

Lessons to be learned:

• If you value your photos, maintain a second backup in addition to TimeMachine. You may use Carbon Copy Cloner to do the job. I love CCC!
• Don't upgrade in haste without having a proper rollback support!

iPhoto '11 is nothing but a redesigned interface and a boatload of new templates. Again, DO NOT upgrade to iPhoto '11. Apple, have you done your QA at all? Or are you totally engrossed in all your iPods and iPads and iDoodads?