Problems downloading photos from camera to iPhoto

Question

All -- I'm running iPhoto 6 on a Mac Mini with the latest version of OS10. I have a Canon PowerShot G3 and shoot 4-megapixel JPEG photos, and AVI movies. Downloading photos from the G3 to the Mac is slow, and deadly slow (as is 15 minutes or more) when there's an AVI movie or two mixed in with JPEGs. I've had to abort several downloads when they just flat out stalled.
Today when downloading a total of 58 JPEGs and 6 AVI's I got an error message - "unreadable files". 51 JPEGS and 3 AVIs downloaded fine. 7 JPEGS and 3 AVIs didn't download. The error message says "The following files could not be imported. They may be an unrecognized file type or the files may not contain valid data."
Any help you all can offer would be much appreciated.
Greg

Answer 1

Isn't technology great? The more you learn, the more you need to learn more.
Have you viewed the iPhoto 6 tutorials? http://www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials/iphoto/new.html The section on Organizing, "Add Ratings, Titles and Comments" could be helpful.
Click on the little blue i on the lower left of the iPhoto window, and the Info Panel should pop up. Select a picture, and it shows the info for it. Select a film roll's name, and you can see and edit the info for the whole roll. Click on the roll's title in the info panel to highlight it and you can type in a new name. You can edit the date of the roll this way, and it will affect how your rolls are listed in the library. The dates "from" and "to" are generated by the dates of the items within the roll. If you type comments about a roll they will be shown below the roll's name in the library when the roll is closed. I like to keep rolls that match my camera cards, but they can be very large. So I use comments to list the events contained in the roll, so I know which roll to open when I want to find a specific photo.
If you view your library in Film Roll view then you see the rolls' names with a little triangle to the left. As in the Finder, clicking on the triangle to make it point right conceales the contents of (closes) an item, while clicking on it to turn it down reveals the items inside the item.
Now the hard part - all those dates. If the dates and times are totally wrong, I would use iPhoto's Batch change to correct them. However, only iPhoto will recognize this date change, because it won't correct the real problem, which is that the EXIF info is wrong for those pictures. There are ways of changing EXIF info which involve downloading other programs, running batch changes, and re-imprting into iPhoto. I've never done it, but I searched the iPhoto 6 forum for "EXIF rename file info" and restricted by user name Old Toad. Try this thread http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1734147&#1734147 and note Old Toad's last post about PhotoInfo.
If you don't mind about the EXIF, then you can just redate them within iPhoto. Select a series of photos from the same date, then go to the Photos menu and select Batch Change. Select Set Date. Type the correct date and give a time for the first picture. To force iPhoto to maintain the same order within the series, check Add 1 minute between each photo. This way, although the times will be wrong, at least they will have the correct chronological sequence. (Or type in the times manually after the batch change if the order is not correct.) I always do this with rolls of actual film I get processed at a store. The photo CD I get never has the correct dates or times, so I add these to at least get them to display in my library in the correct order. As far as I know, you have to run a seperate batch change for each date that you want to change to. Unless you have a series with one photo for each day and wish to check "Add X Days between each photo."
The highest rated member (very talented) of the iMovie forum, Karsten Schluter, still tells people he's just an amateur. We all learn what we need when we need it. I am grateful for the support on these forums. Let me know how it goes.