I have about 10K photos in iPhoto. Per another thread, my old Powerbook is on the fritz and I may need to migrate the iPhoto data into some other (Windows) program.

What do you Windows people use for photo management? And does anyone know of a program that will eat the iPhoto data file, rather than force me to figure out how to export all the individual photos?

Thx

I love my MacBook, but my little netbook is Windows. Picasa3 works nicely on the little guy. It's a free Google download.

I don't think there is a way to not export all the photos. Pretty much any of these types of programs use some sort of proprietary database software to index all your photos so that they can come up quickly and make them even easier to edit and automatically save. When you want to switch program you basically have to flatten your stack and export all your edits. With that said, if you are worried about time, I do not think it is a very long process.

I would echo the above posters Picasa suggestion, though personally I would go with Photoshop Elements if you are willing to spend a little money. I think it is less than 100. It has a stronger photo editing backbone as well as, in my opinion, a much better tagging and sorting set-up.

Picasa is in beta for Mac - so maybe try it on your failing Mac, and then you *may* be able to export the settings?

+1 Vote for Picasa on your Windoze PC

<mod>Please continue to follow this discussion in the Travel Photography forum.</mod>

I love Picasa, too, and definitely recommend it.

It isn't failing, it's failed :-) No video. I had a December backup, but I also accessed the drive over my network and copied everything to a portable drive. Now I have this huge iPhoto backup that I need to get the photos out of. What I would like to avoid is having to mount the drive on my wife's Mac, then load my iPhoto library, and export the whole thing. Ick.

So maybe I can install Picasa on her Mac, import, then move the Picasa file to my Windoze box. While she's at work.

did you try external video?
it's actually very easy to get the photos out of the iphoto library. just do the following:

find the iphoto library, which is more than likely in the pictures folder in your home directory. next, right-click or control-click it and pick 'Show Contents' and look for the folder called 'Originals' and open that. all of your photos are in there. if you modified any of them, then the modified versions are in the folder called 'Modified'.

and if i'm not mistaken, iphoto uses a sql database like aperture does so if you want the ratings, keywords, etc., that would be in the Library6.iPhoto file.

Yep. Known good monitor and known good Apple dongle. Bupkis.

Cool. I'll look. Thanks!

+1 for Picasa. It started off as a practical clone of iPhoto anyway.