iphoto/itunes basic questions

[fallacy]

I got it, lost it, found it, and lost it again. Can someone please explain to me how I should copy, not sync, music and photos to both iphoto and itunes.

From what i understood, I could simply drag and drop a music file into itunes, and then delete from wherever I had originally dragged it from. So at that point, my song would sit in ITUNES for me to drag out of should I want in the future to copy edit or whatever. SO really I no longer have that mp3 in 2 different areas in my macbook and avoid using double the amount of hard drive space.

Same thing with iphoto or so I thought. How should I put pictures into Iphoto? Again, from what I understood I could save a pic from any site, choose any destination on my macbook to save it there, and then drag it into iphoto. So now I have it in iphoto and I thought I could delete it from wherever I originally saved it. To my horror, when I deleted all my pics from a miscellaneous folder on my macbook, the photo's were now also gone from IPHOTO. And I only realized this when I tried to enlarge the pic in iphoto. The error message said it couldn't find where the pic was, yet I didn't realize this because you could still see the pic in it's miniature state in iphoto..

Can anyone, please, pretty please, break it down for this embarrassed and not so new mac user.

many thx.
Owner since August 2006.
macbook 2.0ghz 1.25 gigs of ram.

 

[OwlsAndApples]

For iTunes, in preferences you should have the option selected which automatically adds all your music which you've added to your library into your music folder (you can then delete the original file). If your music is all over the place, use the consolidate library function to copy all your music into this folder. The songs you see in iTunes are in fact links pointing to a file on your computer, therefore it just makes life easier having all of your music in one folder maintained by iTunes. I'm sorry, I don't think I'm very good at explaining this...

 

[mkrishnan]

iTunes: iTunes Menu -> Preferences -> Advanced -> check the boxes "Keep iTunes Music Folder Organized" and "Copy files to iTunes..."

iPhoto: iPhoto Menu -> Preferences -> Advanced -> "Copy files to..." also checked.

Both of these are supposed to be checked by default (meaning you / someone unchecked them at some point... ).

But when they are checked, you should see the behavior you expect. All iTunes songs will be copied into an iTunes folder inside the Music folder in your home directory, and you can delete copies held elsewhere. All iPhoto photos will be held in an iPhoto directory inside the Pictures folder and ditto.

Does that help?

 

[Gee]

There's a setting in Preferences in both programs to 'copy file to library when importing', which I am under the impression means you can then delete the file from wherever it was originally living. Make sure you've got this checked.

Edit: Doh!

 

[OwlsAndApples]

iTunes: iTunes Menu -> Preferences -> Advanced -> check the boxes "Keep iTunes Music Folder Organized" and "Copy files to iTunes..."

iPhoto: iPhoto Menu -> Preferences -> Advanced -> "Copy files to..." also checked.

nice one mkrishnan, that's a better explanation

 

[fallacy]

Guess you're a demi-god for a reason

Mkrishnan, you da man! Or woman! Hell, I'll call you "your majesty" for the clarity in your answer. That is exactly what I wanted to know. You've solved a mystery i've had for a couple of months now.

Not sure how "copy files to Iphoto library" was unchecked, but it must have been me. Itunes was already checked...

what can I say, I'm coming from Windows so I tend to want to dig deep in the settings.

thx for everyones quick input.

 

[mkrishnan]

Glad to help... it's one of those weird transitions from Windows to OS X. OS X really tends to get pissy with you when you try to mess around with its innards. Although it does now offer you the option of managing the locations of those particular files.

Couple of minor warnings. Once you have things set up this way, be very cautious to use Finder to navigate into the iTunes or iPhoto libraries. As you said, you can do the following:

1) In iTunes, if you want a copy of a song, the easiest thing to do is to drag the song from the iTunes library in iTunes to the desktop, etc, and use that copy for whatever, and then you can delete the extra copy when you're done. Kind of redundant, but it works easily enough.

2) In iPhoto, if you have an external editor (e.g. Photoshop), go to the preferences, and in the first pane of prefs, there's an "edit photo with..." item. You can set the external editor there, and then iPhoto will automatically launch the image in the external editor for you. Another trick is that, once you do this, if you set it back to editing in iPhoto (if you wish to do so), then you can still right-click the image and edit it in the external editor. When you do this, iPhoto will retain a backup of the unedited photo for you, so you can crop, etc, without fear of losing the original.

It's not the most efficient system in terms of hard disk space, but it's lovely in terms of simplicity, once you get used to it.