@ snberk103
Wow,
Thank you very much for the very detailed answer.
We photographers are nice people, I find. You are very welcome.
I do have an MBA and therefore iPhoto for organising the pictures. I guess therefore that Adobe PS Elements 10 Editor would be the better choice in this case.
That's what I'd recommend. In iPhoto's preferences you can set which external editor to use. In this case you'd set APE10 as the editor. This then allows you to browse your photos with iPhoto, and to do the basic edits with iPhoto. When you need some extra heavy editing, you use iPhoto to call APE and it will pass its version of the image to APE, and then iPhoto will place the edited version back into its library when you are done with it in APE. This keeps the iPhoto version and the APE version next to each other in iPhoto.
May I ask you a bit more as you have a pretty good knowledge about the topic.
Thanks. Just to warn you, I may have some deep knowledge but it is not very broad. For instance, I don't do video at all.
I have bought a Seagate 2TB external HDD (Backup Plus) where I will move all the finished video edit projects and the raw movie parts once done with them.
Can iPhoto be used to organise external HDD's as well or does it only work with the internal SDD in my MBA?
Assuming that iPhoto manages video like still images, yes and no. You getting into referenced vs non-referenced files. Plus perhaps splitting libraries. See my note below though for more background.
Futhermore, can one of them batch convert and resize pictures as on my previous Windows XP Netbook I used irfan view which worked perfectly. I am shooting hundreds of pictures every week and I just have no time to individually resize them for forums etc.?!
I don't know irfan, but I believe so. Select all the images you want to Export at a particular setting, and choose "Export". You will see a dialogue with all sorts choices. I find Smart Albums a very useful tool, or in this case it may be just a temporary album you need.
More iPhoto Background:
Like other DAMs, iPhoto uses a database along with the image files. When you "Import" an image iPhoto is creating a database record for that image, at a minimum. It also - by default - wants to
move that image into its Library. This Library is hidden from you, the user, because if you move or alter images in the iPhoto library directly (not through iPhoto) you are starting to corrupt the database. Allowing iPhoto to move the images into its library is what I recommend. You can, in a worst case situation retrieve the photos if needed.
The database records where the photo is, plus everything you have done to the photo with iPhoto. All of the editing you do is recorded in the database record, and not applied to the original (Master) image. You can use iPhoto to make as many virtual copies as you want, without taking up more storage space. For instance a colour and B&W version. Or a square and landscape version. Or combinations of these. In each case iPhoto merely makes a note in the database. The "new" image is not created until you "Export". At that point the edits are read from the database, and a new image is created and put somewhere outside of the iPhoto library.
That is why it is so important to not muck about with the images in the library directly (not using iPhoto.) If you muck about, iPhoto may lose track of the image entirely. Or the recorded edits may not work on the altered photo, etc etc.
However, you
can bypass iPhotos default action of moving images into its Library by using "referenced" images. In this case the photos live in one folder, but the database lives in another folder or even another drive. However, if you muck about with the images directly.......
If you want multiple iPhoto Libraries you can do that too. IIRC, you invoke these by using the option key when you start iPhoto and you can switch, create, etc Libraries. To answer your question about the external this may be the way to go. One Library on the MBA, and the other on the external HDD.
Please make back ups. This may mean yet another external HDD. People get very little sympathy on these threads for not having a backup when their HDDs crash. I have an internal Time Machine disk for user error, an external nightly cloned backup for hardware errors, and another external HDD stored off-site for really big errors...
Hope this isn't too much all at once.
I have written a fair bit in the Digital Photo forum on Lightroom, Aperture, iPhoto etc... you may want to search out those threads using the advanced search features, and save me some typing... plus you can read some other opinions on best practices. Note though .... this thread seems to be in Design and Graphics, and most of these discussions are in the Digital Photography forum.
If you want to move this to the other forum (where the photographers hang out) I believe you can use the Report Button (the little exclamation mark icon on the left side) to get a Moderator's attention and to make the request. I think that's how it works.
