03-09-2012, 05:44 AM

I have been using Lightroom to manage my pictures, starting back in my PC days. As I get more used to my iMac Lion, I am seeing the wonder of native Apple apps. Not sure why, but recently when I insert my camera's SD card, iPhoto opens and I just add to iPhoto and then I proceed to import into Lightroom. I shoot in RAW and I do multiple pics of same scene and then weed out the garbage in Lightroom. I began to wonder where all the iPhoto info is kept since I could not see the pics as I see them in the pictures folder, but when I asked for iPhoto info, I saw a file with over 100 gig. I am now questioning the best way to get pics into my computer. Should I import into iPhoto and let that be my main library of pics and then export what I want to work with to lightroom or visa-versa. Any suggestions?

03-09-2012, 06:56 AM

If you're using Lightroom, you don't need to use iPhoto. Doing so just doubles up all your photos, and as you've noticed, you've got an incredibly large iPhoto library that you don't use. I find that although iPhoto is good, it doesn't really compare to Lightroom, so I stopped using iPhoto altogether.

When I upgraded to Lightroom, I just exported all the photos I wanted from within iPhoto into Lightroom and then just binned off the iPhoto library. Granted mine was nowhere near the size of yours, but it allowed me to claw back some gigabytes.

If you're needing assistance in exporting from iPhoto, I described my workflow from exporting to Lightroom in this thread - Confused on workflow

However, it seems that you don't need to export if you've been doing it all this time. You could just go ahead and delete your iPhoto library.

Hope that helps somewhat...

03-09-2012, 09:25 AM

Chuckoir
I like to use iPhoto for some of the special things I can do to photos for email, etc and, of course, for grabbing my pics off iPhone. I'm going to follow your suggestion of just importing what I need into iPhoto
Thanks for the advice