Dropbox: My New Photo Management App

Viticci just wrote up a nice post outlining his move from iPhoto to Dropbox.

After reading it, I started to think about why I continue to suffer with use Aperture. I rarely use it edit my photos, and really prefer it over iPhoto just for the organization in to projects.

So, I’ve made the jump to join Mr. Smooth Hands on Dropbox.

I used Automator to export my library into a folder, with a sub-folder for each project. Automator named each file with the following scheme, based on file creation time:

YYYY-MM-DD at HH-MM-SS-AM/PM

For new photos, I’m using a Hazel rule to do the same thing:

Now, I have a “Photo Library” folder in my Dropbox folder, arranged by project, with a bunch of photos in chronological order. It’s really quite wonderful.

The upload is rough, but once it is done, I’ll have version history, undelete and all of Dropbox’s other goodies working their magic on my photos.

Thanks to iTunes’ ability to sync and iOS device with a folder of photos, I can still get my photos over to my iPhone and iPad easily:

This setup doesn’t harness PhotoStream, however, so I still have iPhoto setup to catch those images, just in case I don’t import something by mistake. All photos get imported into that Hazel watch folder, so my naming gets applied automatically, leaving me to manually sort photos in to their folders at my lesiure.

I can even import from Photo Stream via a nice little piece of AppleScript.