iPhoto behaving really oddly?

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I've just bought a new macbook pro :) this isn't my first mac but it's been about a year since I last had one so I'm refreshing my memory on some things! One thing I really missed about my old mac was iphoto and how simple it was, while doing exactly what I wanted. Now, I'm finding it a bit confusing.

Albums - if I create a new album, it appears with all the photos from whatever album I was previously in, copied over. I don't understand this at all. The only way I've found to make an empty album is by clicking on an already-empty existing folder like 'flagged'. Is this just a quirk of iphoto now?

Copying photos. I had made an album of pictures that I was editing, and then tried to copy one photo so I could have two different versions of it in the same album. But when I click paste, nothing happens. I can only paste the photo into an album where it doesn't already exist. Is there a way to change this?
 
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In fact to add to this, I just edited a copy of a photo that I had in a different album, and it edited all three versions of it I had in other albums!

This is definitely not how it used to work.

It's the most recent macbook pro model, and I think I've got Yosemite on it.
 
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An iPhoto update was released back in October for Yosemite. Try that.
 
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An iPhoto update was released back in October for Yosemite. Try that.

I've got an update available for Pages but nothing else. I literally got this macbook out the box today, should it need updating immediately?
 

chscag

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You already should have the latest version of iPhoto if you have a brand new MacBook Pro. Some things are a bit different than older versions but basically it's still the same iPhoto and does the same things as before. I'm not very adept at using iPhoto myself but find it easy to use for what I use it for. I'm sure others will chime in here to offer help, so stay tuned.
 
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Iphoto is the worse application apple ever developed.
The program is still good, but never what it should be because we cannot buy "stuff" with that, like iTunes.
I have some grip on the current version, but I still struggle with the ever aspect of saving, exporting and uploading pictures, which i take a lot of.
my advice is to play around with iPhoto and manually upload any albums to Flickr, or a photo-sharing website, because iPhoto will and has remove set from sites, or sync with them.
 
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Okay, I got an answer elsewhere so just for anyone else who might come looking for the same thing - instead of copying a photo like you normally would, you have to select the photo and then press cmd + D. This duplicates the picture and you can then edit it without affecting the original.

It looks like 'copying' is just for having the same photo in more than one place. Not terribly intuitive but there you go.
 
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chas_m

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Actually, the "command-d" is unnecessary. iPhoto has always and will always keep a copy of the original automatically by itself. You can check this by opening any photo you've ever edited and go to the menu command "revert to original." Only the edited version is displayed, but the original is always preserved.

The program's handling of albums is exactly the same as its always been (user since day one here). If you have photos selected when you opt to create an album, iPhoto has always and still presumes that you intend for the selected photos to go into the album. These are not "copies" or "versions" of the photos in the main library -- they are the same photos. You're just changing the view.

If no photos are selected when an album is created, the new album will be blank, when you "add" photos to an album, all you are really doing is creating "pointers" to the photos in the main library (ditto with alternative views such as Faces, Places etc). You are simply telling iPhoto that when you have an album selected, only show me the photos I have indicated I want in this album. Nothing actually moves or changes location internally.

IOW, iPhoto is basically a database that really only holds two copies of every picture: an altered/edited version (if you have edited it) and the master (original). It organizes these photos internally by their time stamp and other EXIF information. Everything you see in iPhoto is just "views" of the library based on certain criteria (events, albums, smart albums, manually sorted, whatever).
 
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Actually, the "command-d" is unnecessary. iPhoto has always and will always keep a copy of the original automatically by itself. You can check this by opening any photo you've ever edited and go to the menu command "revert to original." Only the edited version is displayed, but the original is always preserved.

I know that you don't lose the original when you edit a photo. What I'm having trouble with is that I'm sure that when in an album, I used to be able to just make a duplicate of a photo within that album, that was separate to the one I'd copied it from, so any changes made to it didn't affect the one already in the album.

So for example, if I have a photo and I want it in colour and black and white, I'd copy it within the album and edit one to make it black and white, leaving the other as it is.

My problem is that despite seemingly having a copy+paste option, I can't seem to do this any longer in iphoto - no copy appears. Whereas cmd+D seems to work.
 

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