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[Callithumpian]

I have been using MC12 to sync photos onto my new Ipod and have encountered what appears to be a serious problem.

I have 1300+ photos in an album called "Indiana" (my son's name).
Many of them have the same name.
For instance, there are 180 photos named "Indiana & Alison" (my wife's name).
They are all kept in the same folder and their filenames are made unique by their Track numbers.

So, in the folder ./Media/Pictures/Indiana/, there is a file called...
"128 - Indiana & Alison.jpg" and there is another file called...
"149 - Indiana & Alison.jpg" - and many others.

When I sync these files using MC12 only one of these same-named, different-filenamed images is transferred to the IPod.
The rest are dismissed as duplicates, presumably because they have the same name and are from the same album, despite the fact that they have different filenames because of the Track numbers.

Similarly, if I try to drag & drop, MC12 tells me that it has removed a number of duplicates from my intended operation.

What do I need to do to get my photos correctly onto the Ipod?
I am hoping that the solution doesn't involve going to ITunes.

[MusicHawk]

I had this problem with music files, and the solution was to make sure the combination of NAME and ARTIST fields of each file is different from any other. If I have two versions of the same song by the same artist, I can't get both onto the iPod unless I give one a different Name, such as "Song Title #VER2".

I think the MC <--> iPod synch looks at Name and Artist fields (and maybe Album and Genre?) to identify a file, but not at the actual file name. If two or more files have the same values in these fields, they are treated as duplicates and only one (if that) ends up being used. The file name, file size, and data in other MC fields such as Track don't seem to be considered by the synch process.

By the way, I know this was happening because I watched the Details view during synching. In earlier MC it stopped and showed a list of "duplicates" (this was only semi-helpful due to the nature of the displayed list, but at least it made me aware). Now it seems to list the "duplicates" at the start of the Details list with a status of Duplicate. If I then change the tags so each of the "duplicate" tracks has a unique Name, the next time it is not listed as a duplicate. So, try it again and watch the Details view.

Assuming iPod synching of photos uses the same logic as music files, the solution is to give each a unique Name field value, perhaps the same value used for the file name.

[Callithumpian]

That would mean that every time I named an image I would have to assign a track number to the image then rename the file to "Track# - Name", then check to see if I had ever used that name before and, if so, then rename the image to be the same as the filename, including the Track #.

It would be way easier if MC12 simply respected the unique filenames that I already have and transposed them faithfully to the Ipod!

[MusicHawk]

Yes, probably MC could do a bit more to resolve duplicates during synching by looking at other fields and/or the file name. But they might wonder how common this problem is? Even in my library with more than 60 thousand files I just get a dozen or so duplicates when synching, so I'm willing to revise their Name values to make them unique. But, it would be nice to have a synch option to automatically handle synch duplicates, perhaps as it handles file name duplicates by appending a digit.

[Phydeaux]

Perhaps this will help:

Most DigiCams use some form of serial number in their photograph naming algorithm that you could import as a track#... in your case, this number appears at the start of the file name:

So, run a "fill details from filename" with the input "[track #] [Name]". It's a two click process.

Philip