iPhoto Library question from noob

iMax

Quick question.

I've come from windows & had all my digital photos stored in "My Pictures", which when I got a mac I transferred over to my home folder.

I decided to try out iphoto (& like it), but it appears to be creating copies of my photo library to the "iPhoto Library".

My "My Pictures" folder is 30GB (& growing). This looks like it's going to be creating an exact duplicate of that number.

Am I correct ? & if so is there any way to access the photos through finder or will I always have to use iPhoto ?

Pet

If you right-click on iPhoto library and click "show package contents", you can then browse to "originals" which will have all your photos arranged in folders the same way they are in iPhoto. From there, you can drag the "originals" folder to the sidebar to create a shortcut, so that you can quickly access the folder and browse through them.

Lurching

i did the PC to Mac switch last year.
Any of these little problems can be sorted really easily through google. Just ask the question.

alexlyons

Alternatively, you can tell iPhoto not to copy the files into the library and just "reference" them from wherever you put them off the camera. You still go through the same import procedure in iPhoto, but as I said, they aren't copied to the library.

If you like this option and you haven't done much in the way of organising, I'd say delete the library and start from scratch. Under preferences in iPhoto, either in "import" or "advanvced" I think, is the setting to tell it not to copy files into the library.

Do bear in mind though, that if you reference them, and at a later stage decide to reorganize the folders or the like, iPhoto will get incredibly confused and it's not a pretty job to fix.

thecommander

Add them to iPhoto, it will copy and organise. Delete the originals (backup to a drive first).