iPhoto Help Please?

What is the best way to properly learn iPhoto or properly learn how to maintain your photos on a MAC. I am going a little crazy at my house because my wife takes thousands of pictures and uploads everything into iPhoto.

I am starting to think that is a really bad idea. The computer Hard drive was completely full until yesterday when I backed everything up onto a hard drive. When I deleted everything out of the iPhoto Library folder it did free up 158GB of space. But all the photos seem to still be in iPhoto. I think I am doing something wrong but I have no idea what to do.

What is the best way to maintain your photos with a MAC? Is it best to upload every photo into iPhoto? Or do you use a date system and only import the photos you need.

Or if there is a good book or online place to learn what is best to do on a MAC please share it. I like that my wife takes hundreds of thousands of pictures but the hard drive space is what is driving me nuts. I probably have 500GB of pictures on the external hard drive now.

Thanks in advance

jonas111 said:

What is the best way to properly learn iPhoto or properly learn how to maintain your photos on a MAC.

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I would suggest Apple's iLife web site, which features numerous video tutorials on iPhoto.

I am going a little crazy at my house because my wife takes thousands of pictures and uploads everything into iPhoto.

I am starting to think that is a really bad idea. The computer Hard drive was completely full until yesterday when I backed everything up onto a hard drive.

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Not sure what this has to do with iPhoto. If someone is taking thousands of pictures, they're going to fill up a hard drive eventually on any platform, regardless of their choice of photo-management software.

When I deleted everything out of the iPhoto Library folder it did free up 158GB of space. But all the photos seem to still be in iPhoto. I think I am doing something wrong but I have no idea what to do.

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I think you are doing something VERY wrong, and I'm going to refer back to this post every time someone asks me why iPhoto "hides" the photo library from the user. Thank heavens they do, or you would have very likely destroyed irreplaceable photos (and may have done so anyway -- you may be looking at only the thumbnail remnants of the photos you may have destroyed).

If you don't know what you're doing, it's a REALLY SUPER BAD IDEA to delete things.

What is the best way to maintain your photos with a MAC?

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I'm assuming you mean a Mac (it's not an acronym, so it shouldn't be capitalised). The answer to your question depends on your needs, but iPhoto is a terrific program for organizing photos -- assuming you don't mess with its database willy-nilly (this applies equally for most other management programs).

Is it best to upload every photo into iPhoto?

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Again, there's no pat answer for that. I import every photo I shoot, but I also go through each shooting session and immediately delete the unsalvageably bad ones.

Or if there is a good book or online place to learn what is best to do on a MAC please share it.

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The Mac is not terribly complex. In fact, it's a great deal simpler than other platforms, but the trick is to "let go" of bad habits learned elsewhere. The best place to learn more about the Mac is probably the help files built into every program (and the Finder for a general course). If you're struggling due to a "Windows mentality," then I'd suggest having a look at Switch 101. If you're struggling with computers generally, have a look at Mac 101. There's an essay in my signature that's worth a read, and plenty of resources both online and off.

I like that my wife takes hundreds of thousands of pictures but the hard drive space is what is driving me nuts. I probably have 500GB of pictures on the external hard drive now.

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That's impressive. I've been taking pictures fairly actively for about 10 years now and have about 70GB of stuff. Either she's super active or not discriminating enough about what to keep.

In any event, you're probably best off investing in a pair of large, external hard drives (1TB or larger). One will be for your wife's images collection, and the second will be to back it up.

Try Tutor for iPhoto from the app store

I bought her a Canon T2i for her birthday last year and the file sizes from that camera are really large. In 2010 the folder size was 8GB and the 2012 folder was already at 80GB. So part of the problem is she is taking larger photos and there is some video in that as well.

I asked online how to back up iPhoto and I followed the instructions. The photos are safe and backed up on a 1TB external hard drive.

I have to learn more about iPhoto now to help my wife who is very technically challenged. I know there is a way to now access the photos from the external hard drive to view them in iPhoto.

I will watch some tutorials from the apple web site and hopefully learn what I need too.

How do you properly delete the photos out of iPhoto and use the external drive in iPhoto?

jonas111 said:

How do you properly delete the photos out of iPhoto and use the external drive in iPhoto?

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I'm not sure I understand this question. If you're asking how to MOVE a Photo Library from one drive to another, that's pretty easy:

1. COPY the entire iPhoto Library file to the desired destination. DO NOT delete the original iPhoto Library yet!

2. Open iPhoto holding down the Option key. A dialogue will pop up asking if you want to create a new Library (no) or use an alternate one (yes). Navigate to the "new" iPhoto Library file and click okay. That is now the new default library. Quit iPhoto.

3. Move the "old" iPhoto Library file to the trash. DO NOT YET EMPTY THE TRASH.

4. Now open iPhoto again. Everything good? If so, you can quit iPhoto and then delete your "original" iPhoto Library file.

Bear in mind that if you try to open iPhoto when the drive containing your library is not present, a new empty library will be created by default (in your boot drive's "Pictures" folder). Don't freak out.

Connect the drive, and repeat step 4.

Perfect thanks for the advice.

chas_m said:

I'm not sure I understand this question. If you're asking how to MOVE a Photo Library from one drive to another, that's pretty easy:

1. COPY the entire iPhoto Library file to the desired destination. DO NOT delete the original iPhoto Library yet!

2. Open iPhoto holding down the Option key. A dialogue will pop up asking if you want to create a new Library (no) or use an alternate one (yes). Navigate to the "new" iPhoto Library file and click okay. That is now the new default library. Quit iPhoto.

3. Move the "old" iPhoto Library file to the trash. DO NOT YET EMPTY THE TRASH.

4. Now open iPhoto again. Everything good? If so, you can quit iPhoto and then delete your "original" iPhoto Library file.

Bear in mind that if you try to open iPhoto when the drive containing your library is not present, a new empty library will be created by default (in your boot drive's "Pictures" folder). Don't freak out.

Connect the drive, and repeat step 4.

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Quote:
I like that my wife takes hundreds of thousands of pictures but the hard drive space is what is driving me nuts. I probably have 500GB of pictures on the external hard drive now.

"That's impressive. I've been taking pictures fairly actively for about 10 years now and have about 70GB of stuff. Either she's super active or not discriminating enough about what to keep."

Interesting comment. I assume you are not shooting in RAW format then. My files are very large and even though I weed out the bad ones, I have about 260GB of photos since 1998.

The best thing to do after weeding out the photos you don't want to keep, is put the oldest ones on several external hard drives. Notice I said several. You never know when a drive is going to fail.

Part of the problem is she doesn't delete any pictures ever. I wish she would.

jonas111 said:

Part of the problem is she doesn't delete any pictures ever. I wish she would.

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She should really start reducing the number of pictures. Maybe she doesn't know how to delete them. If she's never going to use them, they should go to free up space. If she has 25 pictures of the same thing, keep the good ones and get rid of the rest. Once you get in the habit of deleting, it gets a little easier.

jonas111 said:

Part of the problem is she doesn't delete any pictures ever. I wish she would.

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Buy your wife a 4x5 camera, a light meter and an Epson 750 scanner. I guarantee that when she realizes every photo she takes will cost $5 and take 10-15 minutes of scanning time she will get a lot more selective.

Seriously, there is no need to take that many photos unless she is a professional event photographer. I am a part-time professional photographer, and was a full-time motorsports photographer for four years. My photo hard drive has 620GB on it and I used to shoot more than 1,000 photos per day. These were JPEGs, of course, as I did not have time to edit that many RAW files. I shoot RAW exclusively now, often taking 300-500 photos per weekend, and the first thing I do is go through my photos and throw away the bad ones. I use a 4TB striped RAID for storing and working on my photos, have three backup hard drives connected to my computer and just signed up with Backblaze to store my photos and music off-site.

The best thing you can do for Christmas is enroll your wife in a photography workshop.

Photography Workshops | Digital Photography Workshops | Santa Fe, New Mexico

or

Yosemite Landscape Photography Workshops