iPhoto Exif Cleaner - 1.0

This little application is incredible.

I have been using iPhoto Buddy for as long as I can remember to manage my iPhoto libraries (over 6,500 photos) because iPhoto 5 would simply crawl whenever it contained over 1,000 photos.

Now I find that my Casio Exilim EX-S2 digital camera is the culprit behind the slow loading speeds! (still, fabulous camera though) :)

Once I exported my (five) iPhoto libraries, ran iPhoto Exif Cleaner on the photos and then re-imported them into an empty iPhoto library, the speed increase was absolutely amazing!

My iPhoto library is now loading in a few seconds, where before it would take several minutes. I think now I can finally uninstall iPhoto Buddy and use a single iPhoto library for all my photos!

And as if this weren't enough, iPhoto Exif Cleaner can automatically clean your photos as they are imported from your digital camera onto your computer! What more could you ask for? For FREE?

To see if your digital camera is behind the slowness of your iPhoto library, check out the developer's homepage, as well as Eric Lindsay's page, which goes into some detail on how and why this slowness in iPhoto 5 occurs.

http://www.msephton.plus.com/exifcleaner/
http://www.ericlindsay.com/apple/iphoto5slow.htm

The developer has done a great job on this application, and while I do not have any complaints, I do have a couple of feature requests that may or may not be really easy to do:

(1) For existing libraries, it would be easier if you could simply pick a folder you wanted to clean, rather than having to name it 'DCIM' and put it in the same folder as iPhoto Exif Cleaner

(2) Display real progress as you clean the photos, even if it is only the filename of the current photo, similar to the output of the read-only version

Thanks again for the great app!

I can see that this might be useful in a certain way (and any software developer who offers his creations for free always deserves praise) but-- I have reservations about wholesale deletion of EXIF data.

Do not scrub your photos of EXIF data unless you consider it to be absolutely necessary.

Provided that you set your camera's clock accurately, EXIF data are extremely useful as a permanent record of the manner, time, and even place* where the photograph was taken. (*The EXIF spec includes fields for GPS data. While there are very few cameras with built-in GPS antennae, you can add this information later using the great freeware app GPSPhotoLinker.)

These data are generally not altered unless removed in their entirety, and can be an invaluable reference when you need to confirm the date and time when a photo was taken but (because of moves, copies, edits, or whatever) the name and dates associated with the file (visible in the Finder) have changed. Other data (such as shutter speed, f-stop, etc) are generally more esoteric, but can be critical as well.

If you value your photos at all as records of events or occasions (or, Jove forbid, you think you may ever need to present them as evidence in court) then don't dump the EXIF data.

Apologies to the author <(__)>