Dissecting the New iLife '06 .Mac Folder Structure

A snapshot of the original structure of the .Mac file/folder structure for published pages is included below:



Notice that the contents of each photo album are self contained, meaning there aren't any subfolders or supporting files.

If you used iPhoto from iLife '05 or earlier to publish a photo album, your pictures were uploaded to the Pictures folder on your iDisk. The folder structure for these published albums is included below:



In short, the structure and organization was pretty straight forward and easy to navigate without too much trouble.

When you published your iPhoto album to your .Mac account using iPhoto 5 or earlier, each album had a button to start a slide show with the interface shown below:


The code for this slideshow was provided in this JavaScript file.

iLife '06 drastically changed the way that photos were published to your .Mac account. Rather than publishing the files directly to .Mac, iPhoto 6 now sends the selected photos to iWeb, where you can choose either a blog format, where each photo is in its own article, or to a photo page format, which resembles the original iPhoto output.

To compare the output, here's the folder structure created when I published several photos using iPhoto 6 and iWeb:



Notice that there are a few more files uploaded for each album published. Unlike previous versions of iLife, most of the support for each element on published pages was moved into an iWeb template, which then get uploaded for each and every album you publish. This includes the JavaScript code for the slideshow, which is now included with each file you publish, and is saved in the "your album name.js" file and called from the "slideshow.html" file.

Content created by earlier versions of iLife was saved to your iDisk's "Sites" folder. Every html file in the Sites folder was available at the following URL:

http://homepage.mac.com

iPhoto 5 and earlier published each photo album using the obvious "PhotoAlbum#.html" format, where "#" was a sequential number that matched the number of albums you had published. So, your third album you published to .Mac about "Squirrels in the Park" was uploaded and was available for view at the following URL:

http://homepage.mac.com/yourdotmacname/PhotoAlbum3.html.


This URL is easy to type and doesn't look too ugly, but it doesn't give you any idea about the contents of the web page.
With iLife '06, content is still saved in a "Sites" folder, but now it's a subfolder inside "Web". On one hand, the main URL makes more sense:

http://web.mac.com

On the other hand, when you publish your photo album, iWeb uses the name that you gave the iWeb site and the name you gave to the album, and so the URL for our same example looks a little uglier:

http://web.mac.com/yourdotmacname/iWeb/My%20Pictures/
Squirrels%20in%20the%20Park.html

A much uglier URL, but you do have any idea about the contents of the web page. The %20 mess is the code for a space since most web servers and browsers don't like punctuation and spaces in the URL.

Comparing the output of the two, it's easy to see that finding all of your published photo albums is a little tougher now, but it's just a 2-step process:

1. To find all of your photo albums published using iLife '05 or earlier, look for all PhotoAlbum#.html files inside your iDisk's /Sites folder.
2. To find all of your photo albums published using iLife '06, look for all .html files inside your iDisk's /Web/Sites/iWeb folder, but use the following conditions:
   • Look in the first level of folders that you find
   • Exclude index.html files
   • Exclude slideshow.html files

A little tougher, but still not too bad...

We've been using .Mac for several years now, and though it has gone through some growing pains, we've been very happy with it. The bonus features like Backup and multiple email accounts and aliases make it very useful. If you haven't tried Backup yet, give it a go. Schedule backups of important files to your hard drive, to your .Mac account, or to an external storage location like CDs, DVDs, or hard drives.

Try it today: