Help Pls...new to Mac

Hi, my dad recently bought my a new intel mac as a college grad present...currently installed with Leopard. I am very new to mac and not sure of the how tos and fix its. I had been running bootcamp only to use my installed PS CS3 until I learned to use it better to just start using my iMac completely w/plans to remove the partition altogether. So now I have purchased and installed Adobe Creative Suite CS3 on my mac and am ready to go. NOT! I am having a big problem and not sure what i can do to make this easier.

I am a digital scrapbooker and designer for a few stores.B/c of the huge amount of space scrap kits take I have them all installed on my mybook external HD. With vista you can view the folder contents on the folder itself but i used ACDsee photo manager to organize and view my scrap supplies b/c it allowed me to keep all images on the External HD and not take up space 60GB of scrap stuff right now i need to create and use). The drag & drop feature was nice too.Well ACDSee isnt compatible, iPhoto would move all my files to my mac, & there doesnt seem to be a photo organizer/viewer for mac from what i can find. I tried to Adobe bridge thing and that doesnt seem to help with what i need to do.

Is there a plugin i can get to view the folder contents instead of just blue solid folders to help me with this issue? Does anyone know of a good photo organizer/viewer that works similar to ACDSee I can download? Or am i pretty much screwed to revert back to using bootcamp to design which is 99% of the time i am using my computer?Is there a way to simply run that one application in mac? I love my mac and want to be able to use it all the time not use Vista. Mac's are cooler than PC's by far.

Sorry for the book but just wanted to be sure i explained everything to hopefully help you understand my problem and solution i am seeking.Thank you very much for any help you can give.

 

Is there a way to convert jpegs into an icon so I can do it that way. I have preview in each set but at jpeg files. I could change the icon to that view if i can convert jpeg into an icon. What do you all think?

The folders I need to view are on my mybook external HD. When you change to icons, i only see blue folders and not see a preview of whats in it which is really needed when searching thru a ton of separate folders for each scrap set. That why I thought an organizer or plugin to allow me to see a preview on the folder itself like it does on vista. I cannot possibly remember every folder by name b/c there are at least 100 files in each of those folders. Thanks for the suggestion though. I will try that on my actual mac (not HD).

 

Thank you!

Ok, thank you everyone for your help. I will give them a try and see which works best.

Just one more thing to make sure i understand iPhoto, when i add stuff to iphoto, it doesnt go on my mac HD or do I have to move my iphoto library to my EHD.

TY.

 

Those thumbnails are exactly what would make things easier w/o using a image catalog or viewer.