Women in Technology

Article:		A RAW Look at iPhoto 5
Subject:		Sound annotations?
Date:		2005-01-20 05:26:26
From:		domo
My camera can create .WAV files as sound annotations to pictures. Would iPhoto 5 do anything useful with these? (Or am I stuck with using Canon's functional if limited and depressingly Windows 95-styled ImageBrowser?)

Showing messages 1 through 4 of 4.

• RE: Sound annotations?
  2005-01-20 09:08:51  Derrick Story | [View]
  
  
  I'm wondering about that myself. I'll test today and post my results. I don't even have a guess right now...
• I tested Sound annotations - the results
  2005-01-20 13:58:12  Derrick Story | [View]
  
  
  Well, looks like bad news here for those of you who use sound annotations. In my tests, iPhoto 5 would not recognize the .wav files generated by both my Olympus C-5050 and Contax SL300RT.
  
  There is a workaround here. It could be a whole article, but for now this will get you on the right track.
  
  I thought at first I could just convert the .wav files to .mov files and iPhoto would accept them. But it didn't. I figured out that iPhoto was looking for a video track in the file, not just pure audio. So I added a few seconds of "black" (a 320x240 image using the "Add" command in QT Pro). I then exported the sound annotation using the "Photo-Jpeg" compressor for the video track (the black frame) and "MPEG-4" for audio (formerly the .wav file captured by the camera). iPhoto 5 gobbled it right up, and I could add it to my library.
  
  This might sound like a lot of work, but you could use AppleScript to automate the whole process in just a few minutes. Just keep the file names the same so they match up to the images that the voice notes are for.
• Check this out...
  2005-01-20 14:16:02  Derrick Story | [View]
  
  
  Instead of adding black to the voice annotation, I exported out of iPhoto the actual picture the sound annotation was associated with. I used the Export command, Jpeg format, at 640x480.
  
  I then dragged the jpeg on to QuickTime Player to open the image in QT, selected all, and copied.
  
  I then opened my .wav file in QuickTime, used the "Add Scaled" command, and QuickTime created a video track using the picture. Since I used Add Scaled, the photo is displayed for the entire duration of the audio track. I then exported as described earlier, then imported the new file into iPhoto.
  
  I now have the actual photo displayed in iPhoto while the sound plays. Forget trying to match up sound annotations with the parent images. You can now link show/play both at the same time in iPhoto.
  
  Try it. It's very cool.
• Check this out...
  2005-01-21 00:07:55  domo [View]
  
  
  Thanks! Time to get scripting ...