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This is a vision I have. A piece of software that doesn’t exist yet (at least I didn’t find it) and that I think would be great to have.

The problem This is my situation when it comes to digital photos: We have 2 cameras (a big one, a small one), 2 mobile phones with integrated cameras and 3 Macs: Our stationary MacPro, my MacBookPro and an old MacBook. So we have iPhoto libraries all over. On every Mac there’s one.

What I would love to be able to do is

• easily create one big iPhoto library with all photos in it
• back up our pictures – all of them
• have a selection from within the “big library” on my smaller Macs (the MacBookPro and the MacBook)

What I do nowadays: Every once in a while I export all my pictures from the MacBookPro and import this stack into the iPhoto library of our stationary MacPro. After this act, the iPhoto library on the MacPro contains all of our pictures. But this export/import procedure takes hours: We currently have about 15’000 pictures and I haven’t found a waay to use the smart “Do not import duplicates” feature of iPhoto unless I import the pictures from my camera…

The vision Why not use Flickr as the picture repository. It’s always available, 25$ per year is a price I would be willing to pay, and the services offered are a good value:

Here’s what you get…

• • Unlimited uploads and storage
  • Unlimited sets and collections
  • Access to your original files
  • Stats on your account
  • Ad-free browsing and sharing
  • HD playback for high-definition video uploads NEW

Take the first 3 points, and you have all you need for an iPhoto-Repository. All you need is a piece of software, that syncs the pictures between your iPhoto libraries and Flickr.

I would imagine an iPhoto plugin (or have it just as separate piece of software) that

• pushes all my new pictures from the local iPhoto library to Flickr
  including the meta data that goes with it: album and event structures, comments, tags, geo-information…
• downloads pictures from Flickr to my local machine
  including all the meta data
  based on rules. Examples:
  - Always wanna have the most recent 5GB of pictures on that MacBook
  - All pictures or albums flagged with work
  - Whatever ideas
• Properly handles deletions: Somehow I need to be able to get rid of pictures – for real. Otherwise deleting a picture in one iPhoto library brings it mack with the next sync…
  

And now to the seniores software engineers: iPhoto has an API and Flickr has an API. So hurry, put together the stuff and please send it to me – I won’t charge anything for the good idea     Or let me know if I missed something and this tool already exists!

What a shame that I can’t program at night anymore – then again: may be there are better ways to spend the nights…

Buenas noches,

– Till.