I bought the upgrade to the Apple’s iLife suite, released on Friday. Here’s a gotcha for developers who parse iPhoto’s AlbumData.xml file, though it doesn’t directly affect most users. It affects me, because my own code parses AlbumData.xml to generate my web-based photo albums (such as the England trip pictures I just posted).

Though the overall format of iPhoto’s XML file stays the same (and my script had no trouble reading it), the Comments and Date fields are gone! The Date field is renamed and in a different format, which is no problem to work around because the image file’s embedded EXIF data contains the date as well. The missing Comments field is a different story.

From my quick inspection, the comment data seems to be only stored in a newly introduced iPhoto.db file, which is in some binary format. The rationale for this is presumably performance, but that doesn’t completely make sense, since the photo title is still stored in the XML file and it may be changed just as often.

In any case, here’s a workaround that uses AppleScript to write a parallel folder structure holding just the comments, one per text file. Paste the following into a Script Editor window and run. Use this anytime you’d like to protect your comments from the vagaries of software or platform transitions or upgrades. (The parallel folder structure helps this; the script could have used iPhoto’s internal IDs and generated all the files in a single folder, but that wouldn’t have been as forward-compatible.) GPL-licensed.

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Here are pictures of the scenery in Dartmouth taken during my trip to England over the New Year. Uploading has been slow due to the sudden death of my cable modem. Family pictures are coming next, and are semi-private: you’ll need to enter “family” as the username and my mother’s maiden name in lowercase as the password. The aunts, uncles, and cousins involved should have no problem figuring that one out.

Macintouch has some interesting commentary on anti-counterfeiting measures that Adobe quietly slipped into Photoshop CS. The program now detects images containing currency and prevents you from working with them, even though doing so is perfectly legal, as long as you don’t then make a printout that’s double-sided or very close in size to the original.

[Tim Wright] It would be fairly easy to create other documents which would mistrigger this pattern [described in eurion.pdf].
Now the cat is out of the bag, I fully expect this to start appearing on magazine page backgrounds, books, any documents considered “sensitive”, grocery coupons, etc, which will rapidly render colour photocopiers pretty useless until they disable this feature.
For more amusement, why not put it onto t-shirts or baseball caps, which will neatly prevent people from printing (or editing) photos of you? I’m sure more inventive people will be able to think of plenty of other uses, like car decorations, wallpaper, badges and so on…