This is an application for Mac OS X 10.4.x or higher.

Goal

AliasHerder is a program for Mac OS X whose sole function is to replace all aliases inside of a folder with the files they are referring to.

It has at least two practical applications:

1. iPhoto alias resolver
2. Shopping basket functionality when fetching a bunch of files from a slow file server.

Read further for more info. Click on the arrow to download.

Download AliasHerder (version 1.0.1 – Donationware)

If your iPhoto library has a lot of value to you, and we saved it for you, and hence you’d like to show your appreciation: you can do a US$4 contribution by clicking the button below.

Software development is not cheap and giving away stuff does not come easy for a small company like Rorohiko. Don’t assume ’someone else’ will donate – donations are coming in on the average at something like 1 per 5,000 downloads or less, so we’re not getting rich from this! Of course, donations larger than US$4 are most welcome – simply PayPal them to sales@rorohiko.com .

We use PayPal as our payment processor – all you need is a credit card.

iPhoto alias resolver.

This usage scenario is the reason why we created AliasHerder  - it solved an issue with our 18000+ image iPhoto Library.

Without AliasHerder we would have been faced with the unhappy prospect of painstakingly rebuilding a large iPhoto library.

Here’s how it all happened:

Suppose you are about to give Apple’s iPhoto® a tentative try-out.

You already have a large image collection somewhere on a server, and because you wanted to just try iPhoto without fully committing to it, you configured iPhoto to not copy the files, but instead use file references. It’s one of the iPhoto preference settings.

Now, some time later, after putting oodles of time into rotating and grouping images and events, you decide iPhoto is actually quite usable, and you’d prefer to continue to use it as the main image repository.

So you change the preference to copy the files instead of referencing them, and from that moment on, any new additions to your iPhoto library are now dutifully copied into the iPhoto library.

Problem is: your iPhoto library is now a mix of newer photos residing inside the library, and older photos residing outside of the library. That leads to all kinds of interesting scenarios.

For example: we have our iPhoto Library on a big iMac which doubles as a presentation screen. Part of the imagery was residing outside of the iPhoto library, on a file server, and a second, more recent part was residing inside the iPhoto Library.

As long as we viewed the images while in the office, everything was fine: iPhoto would either grab the file off the internal hard disk, or grab the file off the server, and you’d hardly notice any difference.

The problem started when we took the iMac out to another location for a presentation: suddenly things went wrong. The slide show would show a few slides, and then apparently ‘hang’ for a long time, and then it would only show a low-res version of the slide.

The reason was, of course, that iPhoto was trying to access a non-accessible server: these pictures are represented by an alias inside the iPhoto Library (the iPhoto Library can be a folder or a package, depending on the version of iPhoto used).

Enter AliasHerder. We dropped the iPhoto ‘Originals’ folder (which you can find inside the iPhoto Library) onto AliasHerder, and about an hour of frantic network traffic later, all our images were fully part of the iPhoto library – no more references to the server.

With more recent versions of iPhoto, the iPhoto Library is a package, and you need to do find the iPhoto Library icon, then

right-click – Show Package Contents

to get to the ‘Originals’ folder.

Then drag-drop the ‘Originals’ folder onto AliasHerder, while holding the Option key down. On the dialog that should appear, select the option to recursively process nested folders.

Keep in mind that even though we have tried the best we could, we cannot guarantee that AliasHerder will always work correctly in all situations – so you should really make a backup of your iPhoto library before letting the AliasHerder loose! Grwoof!

Shopping basket functionality when fetching a bunch of files from a slow file server

Suppose you are faced with a slow server (e.g. someone’s iDisk, a WebDAV volume, some file server accessed through a slow data link, a desktop-mounted FTP server,…) and you need to fetch a multitude of files scattered around on that server.

Each time you copy a few files over, you’re waiting for the copy to finish before you can reasonably go to find the next few files you need; during the copy the server is too sluggish for any further browsing.

Sound familiar? Enter AliasHerder.

Step 1: Create a folder on your desktop; you might want to call it ‘Shopping Basket’ or something similar.

Step 2: Browse the server and find some of the files you need.

Drag their icons from the slow server into the ’shopping basket’ folder.

IMPORTANT: Before releasing the mouse button, start pressing the Command-Optionkeys. Keep pressing these two keys until just after you have released the mouse button.

This causes the Finder to create aliases of the dropped files instead of copying them – so this all goes quite quickly; there is almost no waiting.

Continue browsing around and getting aliases to those files into your ’shopping basket’ folder.

Step 3: Drag the icon of the ’shopping basket’ folder onto the AliasHerder application icon.

Now AliasHerder can copy all those files in one single, unattended operation – go have a few coffees.

A few more tidbits of info.

• AliasHerder will only replace file aliases. It will leave folder aliases alone.
• By default AliasHerder will not descend into subfolders of your ’shopping basket’ folder, unless you hold the option key when dragging the ’shopping basket’ folder icon onto AliasHerder.
• AliasHerder also works with Unix symbolic links
• AliasHerder will not modify an alias if it has become detached from its original

Version history:

29-June-2009 – Version 1.0.1:

• Better handling of Option key
• Option dialog
• Can optionally keep alias name as opposed to using original document’s name

24-Jan-2008 – Version 1.0.0:

• Initial release

Let us know if this is useful to you, at support@rorohiko.com. Also, we can help you with any automation needs you might have – if you find yourself doing the same manual task over and over, talk to us – this free AliasHerder is a simple example of what we can provide. Thanks!

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