RE: those original images in iPhoto...
Hi,
Let me express an opinion, and a warning, and perhaps dispel unnecessary fears...
I've heard several individuals say that one "should not go inside the iPhoto Library ever". I'd like to qualify these statements.
First of all, the iPhoto Library is nothing more than a directory and its subdirectories. Yes, there is as a database and thumbnails in other subdirectories, but the original images themselves are just ordinary files stored in a subdirectory of the lead iPhoto Library directory. As such, these photos can be manipulated by any terminal command. What one does not want to do is to delete or rename or otherwise alter the original images, as then they will not be properly represented by thumbnails and in the database. But...one can most certainly copy the original images to another location using standard shell commands without causing any troubles whatsoever. For instance, you might wish to copy all of the images in your entire iPhoto Library to a networked Windows partition. In this case, I would use the "rsync" command to perform the copy of the images, preserving the date-based directory structure as well as ownerships, permissions, timestamps, etc.
So, if you are confident that you can view and perform actions on the directory of original images without changing that directory (and subdirectories, of course), then there is nothing wrong with "going inside" the iPhoto Library. If, however, you are not confident that you can view or copy the original image files without deleting or renaming them, then by all means do not "go inside" the iPhoto Library. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that the original images are stored as normal files (copies of the original) in normal directories, and, as such, can be viewed and copied by standard terminal commands. The iPhoto app has not altered these files in any way. For instance, if you download photos from a Canon camera into iPhoto, the original raw photos (IMG_xxxx.CR2) and original JPEG files (IMG_xxxx.JPG) are in the iPhoto Library and you could even transfer these images back to the camera if you wish. They are simply stored in subdirectories whose names are timestamps.
Secondly, if you only wish to copy a handful of original images, then certainly you could export these images from iPhoto to your desktop or another folder, and use them from there. But doing so of course makes a second local copy of these image files. If you need to do this to 20,000 photos, then exporting all 20,000 images will mean that you have two local copies of them, taking up twice the disk space not to mention the time to export all of those photos. If you simply wish to copy the originals to a Windows drive, then using rsync does not require the intermediate second exported copy of the images. In addition, using rsync does a differential copy, so if you have already made a copy of all of your iPhoto images before, then you can rsync them again and only the new images will be copied over to the Windows drive. If you do the copy instead by exporting the images, and you wish to update your export, then you will have to export just the new images and not the old images. Depending upon how you organize your photos, this may be easy or difficult.
So, in a nutshell, there is nothing "special" to get you into trouble inside the iPhoto Library's Masters directory, as long as you are comfortable with handling file using standard Terminal commands. What you don't want to do is to delete any of the originals...(and even if you did, not all is lost as you could always rsync from the copy back to the iPhoto Library to replace the accidentally deleted originals.
...just my opinion...and, to back it up, I often "enter" my iPhoto Libraries (I have over 50 of them) and view or copy the original images, and I've never experienced any problems from doing so --- iPhoto continues to work as expected...
Regards,
Switon
