My stepfather have been scanning a lots of old film photos lately and I’m talking about hundreds of photos here. Today he realized that a lots of photos are scanned backwards so he asked me if I know how he can flip images horizontally and preferably in batch. I found out that iPhoto don’t have flip option but Aperture have. So it is possible to import photos from iPhoto to Aperture and flip images there but since my stepdad has Aperture on another computer that was not an option this time. I googled and tried to find if someone already had an solution to this but I didn’t find anything and decided to do a little Automator application to do this.

The application let’s you choose images from iPhoto and then flips them using Preview’s “Flip Horizontal” or “Flip Vertical” option. After flipping images the application imports images back to iPhoto to a new album named “Flipped images” or to an existing album. NOTE! The application replaces the old images.

You can find the application here.

I have tested this with iPhoto 09 and iPhoto 08.

I also found out that iPhoto won’t update thumbnails automatically after using external editor so you probably need to rebuild thumbnails. More info here.