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Someone kindly explain iPhoto's folder arrangements?

S

SteveMcQ

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 5, 2005
56
0
I'm confused by it. I've usually just went straight over to my networked PC, so I could still find things through my folders that way, but I transferred my files over to my PB the other night.

Is there any way to explain the archiving system for pics? I can understand how photos are placed in the folder according to year, but after that, it's a mess of numbered folders that don't seem to have any sort of organization. It's:
Pictures>2004>02,03,04>whatever pic
I can't seem to find any rhyme or reason why some pics are in the 02 or 03 folder or whatever.

It works for looking at files in iPhoto, but the moment I need to pull up a pic (let's say as an avatar for Adium), I don't know where my pictures are in the folder system. I have to pull up iPhoto, get more info from the pic, and find the folder its in.

BTW, I'm transferring my files over from my PC, so if there's something I should be doing aside from dragging and dropping, I'd appreciate that bit of info. Apologies if this has been covered before. Was just headed out the door and I thought I'd ask.

Thanks for your time.
 
It's organised by Year>Month number>Day number.
(may be different if you do your month/day thing US-style).

iPhoto's organisation is annoying, but that's the way it does it...
 
There is actually no real reason you need to go into Finder to grab the pictures you need. When you have iPhoto open, and say you want to save a picture to your desktop, just drag the pictures thumbnail to the desktop and it will copy it there. And by holding down 'select' while clicking thumbnails, you can select multiple ones so you can drag entire sets and copy them to whatever folder you want them in.
 
This confused me as well until I realized how they are organized. Then I was like - DUH I should have figured that out before now - how obvious!!
 
tag said:
There is actually no real reason you need to go into Finder to grab the pictures you need. When you have iPhoto open, and say you want to save a picture to your desktop, just drag the pictures thumbnail to the desktop and it will copy it there. And by holding down 'select' while clicking thumbnails, you can select multiple ones so you can drag entire sets and copy them to whatever folder you want them in.
Click to expand...
What if a program requests for it though, let's say as an attachment in Gmail? Or does that work as well as long as I have iPhoto open as well.

So it's year>day...wouldn't have figured, but that's gonna be the toughest change I'll have to get used to. Thanks.
 
I didn't have a problem figuring it out but it helped that I took a lot of pictures in June and noticed that the folder "06" had a ton of folders which looked to correspond to a day taken. From there I figured it out.
 
SteveMcQ said:
What if a program requests for it though, let's say as an attachment in Gmail? Or does that work as well as long as I have iPhoto open as well.

So it's year>day...wouldn't have figured, but that's gonna be the toughest change I'll have to get used to. Thanks.
Click to expand...

It's year->month->day, which is just about the most logical way I can think of to do it. Of course you could have a flat hierarchy of folders by date (ie, year month and day all in the name of each folder), but it's a matter of personal opinion which is better.

To do what you suggested as an example, that is sending a photo as an attachment using GMail, I would:

1. Within iPhoto, select the photo I wanted to send.
2. Drag it to the desktop
3. Click attach file in GMail and then choose the file I just dragged to the desktop.
4. Send the message
5. Delete the file from the desktop
 
mduser63 said:
It's year->month->day, which is just about the most logical way I can think of to do it. Of course you could have a flat hierarchy of folders by date (ie, year month and day all in the name of each folder), but it's a matter of personal opinion which is better.

To do what you suggested as an example, that is sending a photo as an attachment using GMail, I would:

1. Within iPhoto, select the photo I wanted to send.
2. Drag it to the desktop
3. Click attach file in GMail and then choose the file I just dragged to the desktop.
4. Send the message
5. Delete the file from the desktop
Click to expand...

Or hit the e-mail button in iPhoto.
 
wwooden said:
Or hit the e-mail button in iPhoto.
Click to expand...

I had assumed he was talking about using GMail's webmail interface to send a picture as an attachment. Obviously if he's got his GMail account set up in Mail (or another email app) the email button in iPhoto is the way to go.
 
thumbnails

Is there a way to view thumbnails in a folder in the finder?

I'd like to browse through some folders with pictures, without having to bring them all into iphoto first.
 
This is why I don't use iPhoto as I have all my photo's organised perfectly and I dont want to go through them importing them to iPhoto completly changing that setup so I use a program called picture arena. http://www.picturearena.com/
Its far better than iPhoto from what I've seen from it so far. I used to use preview before that , but its a pain to use with lots of different albums.
 
Its b******s is how I would explain it. Got sick of this and it supporting some RAW formats and not others and then converting RAW's to JPEGS before you can use them.:mad:

Shelled out the money and got iView what a cracker program well worth the money.
 
I too would prefer to use something like Picasa on a Mac. My iPhoto experience isn't the best.

My case especially, as I have TONS of photos that were uploaded or scanned in at different dates from when they were taken. So I have them on my external drive (from when I was using Picasa) in nice, organized folders by year, month, etc.

So my current structure looks like this: 2004 > October > Halloween

But when I moved a portion of my pics to iPhoto, it screwed my whole system up, and it put them all in weird folders that weren't actually indicative of the date they were actually taken.

We should at least have the OPTION of choosing how we want our photos archived.
 
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