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Preserving photo attributes


When you use iPhoto Library Manager to copy photos between libraries, it will preserve a number of associated pieces of data that go along with those photos. This metadata is stored inside the iPhoto library's database, and thus is normally lost when moving photos between libraries by exporting from one library and reimporting into another. The photo attributes that are preserved by iPhoto Library Manager are:



In iPhoto '08 or later, if a photo has been marked as "hidden" in the library it's being copied from, iPhoto Library Manager will mark the photo as "hidden" in the library it's being copied to as well


In iPhoto '09 or later, iPhoto Library Manager will also copy any Places or Faces data that you have assigned to your photos.


When copying photos that have been assigned a geographical location in iPhoto, iPLM will transfer that same data over to the destination iPhoto library. If you have created a custom place in the "My Places" window in iPhoto, and you copy a photo that has been assigned that place, it will be copied over to the destination library as well. There is no way to just copy a custom defined place - you must copy a photo that has that place assigned to it in order to transfer the place to a different library.


iPhoto Library Manager will also bring over any faces that you have tagged in your photos when you copy them between libraries. Faces are identified by the name assigned to them in the "Faces" view in iPhoto, and iPhoto only allows one person to be identified with a given name, so iPhoto Library Manager will reuse existing face definitions when possible. It will also carry over the full name and/or e-mail address of each person if you have entered values for those.


For example, let's say you have two libraries, which we'll call library A and library B. In library A, you have a person named Bob Smith, but in the Faces view, he is simply named "Bob". In library B, you have a person named Bob Jones, but again, in the Faces view, you've simply called him "Bob". If you copy a photo containing Bob from library A over to library B, iPLM will reuse the Bob already in library B, which is probably not what you want, since they are two different people. If you want to make sure your two Bobs don't get confused, you should type in different names for each of them in the Faces view, so that they remain as separate entities if you end up copying a photo of one of them to another library.

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