TheMacJedi

There has been this recurring problem with syncing my iPhone to iPhoto. I plug my iPhone into the USB port, iTunes comes to life and syncs my music, calendars and so on. But I took pictures with my iPhone, that’s suppose to make iPhoto come to life and let me import them. For many months iPhoto would not recognize my iPhone, I reset my iPhone, deleted preferences, restarted, nothing would make it work. So last night I spent a couple hours researching the problem. I read dozens of entire threads on people with similar problems.

In the middle of one of the threads someone posted “TRY A DIFFERENT USB PORT”. I wanted to blast them for wasting my time and posting such a simple fix to the problem. But then I remembered one of my clients was having trouble with their USB modem adapter and the solution was to use the USB port closest to the front of the MacBook. I paused for moment, looked to see which USB port I was using, it was the one furthest from the front of my MacBook. It couldn’t possibly be that simple, I unplugged the USB cable and moved it to the USB port closest to the front of the MacBook. Hello iPhoto, it popped up and was ready to import my photos. I couldn’t believe it, not because it worked but because I has inadvertently used the rear USB every time without even thinking about it.

That leads to a hardware question. What’s wrong with the rear USB port on the MacBook?

I’m assuming you’re using Tiger (10.4).

I use the comments in iPhoto to tag everything, I was surprised when Spotlight was not finding photos based on their comments in iPhoto.

Here’s what you do if you’re having the same problem.

Open iPhoto, select your Library, select all photos (I have 6866), do a batch change to the comments (I just entered a comma, select append), let it finish and don’t do anything else (don’t click on Spotlight, don’t change Albums) just leave it alone and wait a couple of minutes, then click Undo and close iPhoto.

Now you should be able to find photos based on their iPhoto comments.