What would you suggest? I am lost with iPhoto.

Have you tried the "Media" section yet?

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When you hit the button to upload a file, a dialog box will open to allow you to choose the file. On the left side will be a sidebar that is similar to the sidebar available in Finder. One of the locations in the sidebar should be "Photos".

Here is a screenshot.
http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=13893761&postcount=11

 

If you let iPhoto import your photos from your camera or other device it will put them in it's Library. You can turn this off in Preferences, Advanced. If you do that then create folders for your photos and copy them to that folder rather than letting iPhoto import them then when you open them in iPhoto it will create a copy which it stores in it's Library.

Make sure you read the Help about this as moving photos around different folders will confuse iPhoto. To e-mail or upload photos to a site like Flicker you select the photos in iPhoto then click the Share icon on the bottom right of the iPhoto screen. If the sharing site you use is not visible there go to Preferences, Accounts and add the details of the account you have on the site you want to use to share your photos. The site should then appear when you click on the share icon.
Or if the photos are in the folders you created then you simply choose them as attachments to your e-mail or upload them through your photo sharing sites upload system.

Stewart

 

For me, the organization and structure of the iPhoto Library management outweighs these issues. When I need to e-mail a picture, I select the images in iPhoto, click Share, and then E-mail and they are attached to an outbound e-mail message. There is an iPhoto preference to attach them as regular e-mails and not fancy formatted templates.

For other uses, just drag the photo(s) from iPhoto to your desktop to make a copy, or to another application to open them.

This way your photos are still organized, but you can get them to other programs easily as well.

I know this doesn't work for everyone, but I find it works well for myself and most of the people I know...

 

Picasa

Seriously, I've used a lot of Apps and like the Apple way of doing things but I can't abide iPhoto...

 

I use Dropbox, but as I don't use iPhoto, I can't tell you any specifics.
But as you can move the iPhoto Library, it should work just as well.
I use DropBox to synch my TextExpander library and Avid Media Composer projects between my Macs, and haven't had a unsolvable problem yet.

 

Basically - and I say this with a bit of tongue in cheek - if you are trying to access photos directly, then you are doing ti wrong.

iPhoto is doing what it is designed to do. It wants to manage your photos (and hide them) because there can be a lot of data that is related to the photo in iPhoto's data-base. If you were to move a photo, or edit it in another program (without using iPhoto to start that program) then the information that iPhoto has about that image is wrong, and the database starts to be corrupted.

If you use iPhoto to make edits, those edits are "non-destructive" - that is to say, the original image file is not touched - iPhoto merely makes notes of what it did to the image in the data-base. This means you can always revert to the original if necessary. It also means you can export a web-appropriate version, an email appropriate version, and a big print appropriate version without having to make copies of image for each version. (You may have noticed that you never actually "save" in iPhoto - you need to export the image if you want to use it.)

My suggestion is to let iPhoto import the photos into it's own secret files. Learn to use keywords, events, and albums to sort the images. It's more work to start and to learn, but once you have a good system going you should find it easier to find the images you want. Plus you get the benefit of all the other things that iPhoto can do for you.

So - seriously.... instead of trying to fight iPhoto, and making it work the way you used to work - learn to do things the iPhoto way. If you do, I very much believe you will come to like the application a lot.

Luck.