Thanks for this explanation.
Coming from a PC, I'm guessing the biggest difference is this:
Nope, what you go on to describe is because of the way that iPhoto works, its nothing to do with Mac vs PC.
On a PC, I'm used to "opening" a folder: "my pictures" and see a bunch of folders inside with more folders within those folders etc...and when I double click on a photo, it opens with another program (picture viewer etc...)
And you can still do exactly that with Mac. You could use almost any photo viewer including the ones I mentioned, such as Picasa and PSE (or full photoshop) and have it work that way, plus get stuff like tagging, faces etc overlayed on top of your existing folder structure. Its just iPhoto that wants to hide away all the photos inside its own database structure (which is actually just a very obscure set of folders/subfolders really)
I guess what confused me is that iPhoto is the "folder" where all my pictures reside and also the "viewer" (correct??).
Sort of
😀 iPhoto is the viewer, and it looks at pictures inside a "special folder" called a package, which in this case is called iPhoto Library though as far as I know it doesn't have to be the same name, it could be called anything.
Question 1: In other words, if I go to "finder" and try to find the "folder" structure for where all of my photos exist . . will I find a folder with all pictures inside? I'm guessing the answer is "no" . . . and if this is the case, how do I back up all of my photos onto an external hdd? Does this have to be done within 'iPhoto" export feature or is there a "main folder" within "finder" that contains all of my photos that I can "copy/drag & drop" onto an external hdd??
Well ...it depends
😀 IF you go with the option where all the photos are in that special folder, you mess with its structure at your peril. You can back it up by just copying that entire package, which is akin to copying an entire folder structure by starting at the top most level. Or you could use something like Time Machine and make sure that iPhoto Library package is included which it would be by default.
If you go with the option where iPhoto uses your folder structure, then you can see all the folders as normal.
Question 2: If you tick "copy items" while importing photos from an external hdd into iPhoto, will there be "duplicate" copies of each photo existing on my computer (internal hdd)? In other words, if I import 100 gigs of photos onto iPhoto from an external hdd, will those 100 gigs of photos take up 200 gigs of space on my iMac?
Yep. Normally, if you were going to do that, eg import into iPhotos structure, then once you were happy you had imported everything
and backed it up, you'd delete the originals, if you didn't want to take up an extra 100Gb.
I go back to my original advice, which is if you already have an existing complex folder structure with many photos, you could try using iPhoto with the "do not copy" option, but I suspect you are likely to be better off with a photo editor that was designed to work within your existing folder structure. I may be doing iPhoto an injustice but I think its more of an afterthought in that case.
Hopefully less so now?
😀
