iPhoto Import Question

iPhoto won't save your folder info, just the pics.🙁 It will force you to have pics sorted by date taken/ edited until you have created iPhoto albums and folders where you want them.🙁 I'm not the expert, tho. mebbe there is a way...

Si. said:

Hi all,

I have a large numbe rof photos stored in directories, ae there any scrits or tools that will import these images into iPhoto but retin the folder structure?

Click to expand...

Don't know is this is exactly what you're looking for, but iPhoto 6.0 has an option under Advanced that lets you import photos into iPhoto but leave them in their original folders on your drive. So you could move your folders to your ~/Photos folder (or whereever you want them), set the preference, and then import them and it shouldn't touch the folder structure.

Using advanced options when importing from a hard disk

By default, iPhoto copies photos imported from your hard disk, leaving the originals in their original location and making duplicates for use in the iPhoto library.

However, if you already have an extensive collection of photos saved on your computer and you prefer to leave your photos in their current file structure, you can choose to have iPhoto point to your original photo files instead of copying them in iPhoto. Either way, you can still make full use of iPhoto.

Click to expand...

What I found is that after a few weeks of using iPhoto, I never had a reason to browse thru the folders on the hard drive manually. If I wanted to email someone a pic, I find the pic in iPhoto and use the email wizard. If I wanted to update a picture to a website, I find the pic in iPhoto and drop it on the "Browse" window in the web browser and iPhoto fills in the path to the photo automatically. It's pretty cool.

srf4real said:

iPhoto won't save your folder info, just the pics.🙁 It will force you to have pics sorted by date taken/ edited until you have created iPhoto albums and folders where you want them.🙁 I'm not the expert, tho. mebbe there is a way...

Click to expand...

That was only the case up to and including iPhoto 5

If you're using iPhoto 6, just go into its Preferences and tell it not to organise your Library and you can just point it at your current setup. It is slightly messier though and more likely to lead to iPhoto's structure being corrupted down the line since if you change things around in the future, iPhoto might not necessarily know about it.