A few months ago, I upgraded our family room's HTPC by replacing the old Shuttle box with a nice Intel-powered Mac Mini. So far, nearly everything has been hunky dory. Front Row pretty much works as advertised, and that's the computer's main use.
But one sore point with me has been an inability to wrangle iPhoto to display my photos I have on an external drive attached to the Mac so that we can view them through Front Row (which only talks to iPhoto for photo-viewing purposes).
Basically, what I want iPhoto to do is simply index and display photos stored on an external hard drive, in much the same fashion that iTunes handles MP3 files stored externally. You see, I keep all my "original" photos on a machine elsewhere on our network -- the files on the Mini's external drive are merely copies, updated as needed via network backup. So, when I add some new photos to the collection, all I want iPhoto to do is realize I've done so and make the new folder available via Front Row. Isn't that easy?
Yet there's apparently no way to do that. iPhoto wants to be the sole photo-management app and really makes it difficult to interact with photos that aren't "imported" directly through it. In that sense, iPhoto is really an overly egocentric, yet very lame, program.
Anybody have a suggestion as to how to view our photos via Front Row? Anyone? Bueller?
