What a fun couple of hours I’ve just spent going around in circles!

The task was to create a video of a recent family celebration consisting of a couple of bits of video and a few photos. Not an onerous task I thought and one that was eminently suited to the integrated iLife suite on my Mac.

With all the source material in iPhoto it’s into iMovie I go; create the new project, import the material into the timeline from iPhoto, apply the theme, transitions and titles and preview the finished article.

It all looked great up until the point when the photos started to appear. Although the photos showed correctly on the timeline when it actually played it just previewed the same photo each time. Okay, maybe it’s a preview issue so I rendered the movie out to check; forty-five minutes later and the problems still there!

A thorough Internet search ensued and it seems I’m not the only one seeing this problem. That’s good I thought as there’s bound to be a solution somewhere; so started my quest to find it. There were many entries discussing clearing iMovie caches and removing .plist files and I tried them all to no avail; iMovie resolutely refused to show the actual photo that was clearly visible in its timeline.

Finally, in a desperate last-ditch attempt I exported the photos from iPhoto to a folder on my desktop (as mentioned in the penultimate post on the third page here). I then imported them into the timeline from there and replaced the originals from iPhoto. Success!

It’s interesting that the integrated iLife suite isn’t entirely integrated but at least I found a workaround that meant I could finish the movie and share it with the family. I love the internet!

Poppa G