Duplicated Pics?

Hi everyone. So im bought a Macbook (2ghz, white) yesterday and i put my pics from my old alienware laptop onto it and then i imported those into iphoto. So under my mypics file on the harddrive it has, for example, a folder named Europe with all my pics from Europe in it but then in the iphoto library folder under 2005 there is also a foler Europe with the pics in it. So i just wanted to ask if these are duplicate folders and if i delete the one that is just under my pics then i will still have the one in iphoto right. Or does iphoto create these two folders and the second one is just a named one that makes it pull up the others in iphoto?

Sounds like a very duh type question but i just wanna make sure before i get rid of it cuz they are very precious pictures to me.

Thanks for the help.

One is for originals and one is for edited photos. You can delete the originals, but you won't be able to "Revert to Original".

I would suggest leaving them alone, unless you *really* need the HD space.

Approach this VERY carefully. First of all, when you import photos into iPhoto you literally do import - it makes a copy. If like me you don't want that, you can set up an option in its Preferences, Advanced, Importing section to not copy the photos into the iPhoto library when imported. If you do this, iPhoto still creates the same structure in the iPhoto section of your Library, but each entry is just an alias to your original. This can save a LOT of hard disk space if you have a signficant collection (mine is over 4 GB - I didn't want this replicated!).

To do this properly, I would make a backup of your originals (just in case). Then I would delete your ENTIRE iPhoto library from within iPhoto itself. Then I would reimport your photos back to iPhoto, with the "no copy" option I mentioned above set.

This is what I did and it worked like a champ. I now have one copy only of my photos, but all of iPhotos clever capabilities, such as smart albums and so on.