Import and export images to and from Photo Booth

If you have kids and a Photo Booth-equipped Mac, you've probably got hundreds of photos in Photo Booh, with no easy way to navigate them. You can move them all into iPhoto and manage them there, and then delete them from Photo Booth. You can also move photos into Photo Booth, though that's a bit trickier. Exporting and removing images from Photo Booth Click on one photo in Photo Booth and hit command-R to reveal the file in the Finder. In the Finder window, hit Command-A to select all, then hold down the command key while clicking with the mouse to deselect any pictures you don't want to move and delete. Open iPhoto and create a new album to hold the pictures you're moving over. Go back into the Finder and drag all the selected photos over into iPhoto. After the file transfer is done, click back over to the Finder (but don't click into the Finder window or your selection will disappear). Hit Command-Delete to move the selected files to the Trash. Importing images into Photo Booth But what if you want to import a photo into Photo Booth -- perhaps one you moved out earlier? Here it gets a bit trickier, as you need to mess with the Recents.plist file that sits in the Photo Booth folder and serves as a directory. Read on for the how-to... Move any photos that you want to add to Photo Booth into the folder where it keeps its images. (Again, to find the right folder, use Command-R on any of the photos in Photo Booth.) Make a backup copy of recents.plist by selecting it and typing Command-D. Quit Photo Booth and drag the original recents.plist into a text editing program like TextEdit. You'll see an XML file with fairly simple syntax: Photo 1.jpg Photo 2.jpg To make any new photos show up in Photo Booth, all you have to do is edit this list, adding new entries to the list with the correct file name and the correct syntax. But what if you've made a lot of changes to the files in the folder? Rather than typing in names manually, you may want to generate a fresh list of the files currently in the folder. Open terminal. Type cd, then press the Space Bar. Now in Finder, drag the folder you're working with into the Terminal window. Mouse click on Terminal to make it active and hit Return. Then type ls -1 (that's lower-case l, s, and the number 1, meaning "list short with one entry per line"). Hit Return again. You should get a list of all the files currently in the folder. You'll have to massage the list a bit (I usually employ Microsoft Word for find and replace work) to translate it into the proper format. Open Word and paste in the data from Terminal. Delete Recents.plist from the end of the list (since the finished plist doesn't need to include itself in the list of photos). Hit Command-F, then click on the Replace tab. Enter ^p in the search field (that's the code for paragraph breaks) and enter ^p^t in the replace field. Click on Replace All. Add a to the first item in the list, and delete any unneeded extra stuff at the end of the list. Select the results and hit Command-C to copy. Switch to the recents.plist file that you've opened in TextEdit, select all the lines, delete, and paste in the new lines from Word. Save the new recents.plist file to disk and reopen Photo Booth. All the pictures in the folder should now display.