help organizing photos on mac

I have had a mac for about a year and like almost all about it. My problem is photos. I want to go through my massive photo library and sort them into folders or albums. But, this thing iPhoto does, which is keep them in their original place and then just dupe them into a folder or album doesn't work for me. I want a solution like windows was - go through all my chaos of photos and drop them into folders. With that being the only place they are stored - in the folder/album. I don't like sorting by date. For example, I like to have a folder per each of my kids. I have 30K photos - and the only way for me to organize them is to start at 30K of unorganized photos and chip away at them (reducing the 30K of unorganized photos) and drop them into individual folders/albums. Trying hard to find an app for this. Any ideas?

You're overthinking the problem. Severely.

I mean, if you really have that much time on your hands and a need to fill it, be my guest, but ... iPhoto has "Faces." Train it to recognize your kids' faces and BOOM all your kids' photos.

Alternate approach: use Faces to tag each of the photos your kid(s) appear in with their names, then create a smart folder that shows you all photos with that tag in it. Again, BOOM.

Maybe other people are different, but sorting through 30K photos is **precisely** why I bought a computer -- to do jobs like that so I don't have to!

Let me just say at the very beginning that fiddling with the way iPhoto works is a very bad idea. People who have tried have on occasion lost everything.
Having said that it would be good to know more details about your operating system OSX ?
and the version of iTunes at least.
But here is a suggestion you may not have thought of. In all recent versions of iPhoto you can create new Libraries. Hold down the Option Key when starting up iTunes and you will see a window with one library marked as (default) using the window options you can create a new library and name it whatever you want. But heres the catch, you can only have one library open in iPhoto at a time. So you will need to export the photos you want for each library to say a folder on your desktop. Then import them into whichever library you choose (using the option key method) for later versions of iPhoto you will find a "switch library" command under the File Menu.
To really achieve what you would like to do a third party app is required. The best of them is here; Fat Cat Software
but it's a bit expensive at $30.00. Still it does do the job.

"But, this thing iPhoto does, which is keep them in their original place and then just dupe them into a folder or album doesn't work for me"

It only dupes if you want it to. In Preferences, Advanced ensure 'Copy to iPhoto' is not clicked. The originals then stay exactly where you left left them. You can still sort in iPhoto to your hearts content.

Advanced ensure 'Copy to iPhoto' is not clicked. The originals then stay exactly where you left left them.

Click to expand...

But, if you delete the originals, then they disappear from iPhoto as well.

MightyGem said:

But, if you delete the originals, then they disappear from iPhoto as well.

Click to expand...

Obviously.

I thought you were complaining about storing duplicates. Now you are complaining about not storing duplicates! Suggest you make your mind up before deciding on a course of action.

Unless I've got this wrong, iPhoto doesn't duplicate when you add to Folders/Albums, it just links to the originals.

MightyGem said:

Unless I've got this wrong, iPhoto doesn't duplicate when you add to Folders/Albums, it just links to the originals.

Click to expand...

That is correct. The only duplications are edited images and you could argue that they are not really duplicates anyway. If you decide you only want the edited version you can trash the originals. If you do decide to trash them they go into iPhoto trash and remain there until you empty the iPhoto trash.

Thanks, just what I thought.

vickybee22 said:

...I want to go through my massive photo library and sort them into folders or albums....I want a solution like windows was - go through all my chaos of photos and drop them into folders. With that being the only place they are stored - in the folder/album. I don't like sorting by date. For example, I like to have a folder per each of my kids...

Click to expand...

Although it's natural to think of photo organization in terms of files and folders, that is very restrictive. E.g, you can only classify them by one category -- say kids. Maybe you sometimes want to search by person, or location, or event (vacation, birthday, holiday, graduation) or search by some combination of these.

The best way is decide on a photo organizing program which allows keyword tagging and stick with this. You have to make the time investment regardless of whether you're moving photos to folders or keyword tagging them. The advantage with keyword tagging is they're subsequently searchable many different ways. As you accumulate more photos this becomes a bigger deal, and pays bigger dividends.

iMovie (which you already have)
Adobe LightRoom: Photo editor app | Download free Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 trial
Picasa: Picasa
The upcoming OSX Photos app: https://www.apple.com/osx/photos-preview/