.....
And, from there, I suppose I need to look into some sort of backup like time machine or skydrive, etc. right?
So, to recap, I'm totally safe to import pictures and then get rid of the originals? The reason I was so skeptical about this is because nearly every experience I've ever had with iTunes has been a bad one. I feel like any time I've imported music to iTunes, I've lost all control of the file. So, with iPhoto, once the whole concept of "importing to library" was thrown out there, I freaked.
In my opinion - yes perfectly safe. iPhoto works like this. It has a catalogue (database) where it keeps notes about your photos - everything it knows and does.
And it has a folder structure where it keeps the original images. By default the folder structure is hidden from the user inside the library, but it's not hard to get to if you really needed.
When iPhoto moves your images into it's own folder structure - that is the last time it actually touches your images. After that your original images just sit there. iPhoto never touches them or changes them. If you made a copy of your image and tucked it away before importing, you would then be storing two identical copies of the photo. Even after heavily editing the image, the two files would be identical.
Because....
The second part of iPhoto is that catalogue, a database. For everything you do to the image a note is made in the database. Keywords, albums, captions etc.
Also, all of edits. Just notations in the database. When you want to look at the image, iPhoto merely pulls up the original (untouched) image and applies the edits that are noted in the catalogue.
An exception to this hands-off approach is when you pass an image off to an external editor, using iPhoto to invoke that editor. In that case iPhoto makes a copy of the original (untouched still) image, applies your edits and gives that copy to the external editor. When the external editor passes the finished image back - the edited image - is now a separate image from the original and is "imported" back into iPhoto. The edited image is put into iPhoto's folder structure, and a database entry created for it. And I think it's also virtually linked back to the original (still untouched) photos. And I believe the edited image also inherits all of the metadata entries (captions, etc). I'm more familiar Lightroom (Lr) now, so I may be recalling these iPhoto specifics not quite correctly.
The weak link in this whole process is the database, because it
can be corrupted. That is why it must be backed up regularly. And of course the images as well. Backing up the iPhoto Library catches both, I believe. In Lr the database and images are often saved in separate locations. But I think the default for iPhoto is to tuck everything into the library. However.... even if the database is totally lost .... the images are still just sitting there - untouched.
A Digital Asset Management system is very powerful tool, but it can take a real mental shift to use it efficiently. If you feel you are fighting it, then to quote a popular saying " you are (probably) doing it wrong." Obviously, for some people, the iPhoto workflow won't ever feel comfortable... but in my experience those people who adopt the recommended way of doing things will find a DAM system makes their lives a DAM sight easier (pun intended). One of the hardest things to do is to let the DAM do the hard work. There's no point, with a DAM, to renaming photos and slotting them into named folders for storage. Let iPhoto do its thing. Where you need to do the work is to set the albums, events, keywords. And then learn to use Smart Albums.... one of the best features of a DAM.
Basically, you don't try to decide any more if a photo goes into "Birthday Party", or "June", or "Becky", or "Family", or "Becky's friends".... it goes into all of them. You set up Smart Albums that search for photos with each of those keywords. When you import the photos you merely add those keywords, and now those photos appear in each Smart Album. A variation is to create a folder for number of Smart Albums, and call the folder "Family" (for example) instead of creating a separate SA for "Family". Put the SA Becky (and others) into the Family folder. Now whenever you need to find photos of Becky you just go to the Family folder, and peer inside Becky. Every photo of Becky is there.
SAs update themselves on the fly. Import some new photos, and use "Becky" as a keyword, and the images can immediately be found in the SA Becky. Even if you don't create a SA for keyword it can be used. You can open the Becky SA and do a search on the keyword "Birthday", for example to just locate images of Becky at Birthday Parties.
But wait, there's more.... Once you have identified all the photos you want to work with for a project, create a regular album and drag all of the images to this album. Regular albums don't update themselves on the fly (as do SAs) - you must put images into the album, where they'll stay until you pull them out. Now you can create a book, a calendar, order prints, create a slideshow, export them for mailing, upload them to Facebook, etc etc. Becky would love a book with the pictures from her birthday party, by the way.
And since all of this is happening only in the database, your storage requirements haven't gone up by more than a few text lines in the catalogue.
) and to combine my images in ways I would not have thought of under the old way of organizing (pre DAM).