N0ob question about finding and transferring photos over to external.

Okay, so there are a few issues here. I am a PC guy kind of converted over. I say that because the way this file system works is very confusing to me at least.

Purchased my first macbook for photography editing etc.

Right now I have Aperture and iPhoto installed. iPhoto came after Aperture so I think some of the galleries or events or whatever it's called pulled over. However I can't find all of the photos. I have an external drive I want to move all of the photos over to and can't figure out a way to get these over nor can I find ALL of the photographs that are on here in a state where I can drag them over to the drive and they copy. Is it really this difficult? I also tried Lyn and that isn't seeing every photograph either. Nor will it allow me to copy over.

Are there any apps that list the file structure simply like windows where I can just copy over from one to the other?!

The internal file and folder hierarchy for the iPhoto/Aperture library is necessarily rather complicated. It is best to stay out of there and just select files in iPhoto/Aperture then use the File > Export methods to save what you want to some external space.

I tell people to think of iPhoto as their pictures folder. It works almost exactly the same way; photos are stored in "subfolders" called Events which are organized by date, but you can cut and paste photos from one Event to another if you want. You can also drag and drop copies of the photos to other locations, including external drives. Transferring photos is essentially no different from moving them between folders.

The tricky part is Aperture. I don't know how it deals with files, but it may just share photo libraries with iPhoto or at least work the same way. All your photos should be in iPhoto, unless Aperture is doing something weird with them.

I would guess that some of your photos have ended up in the wrong Events. Sometimes when you import photos, they get assigned to an Event with the same date, though I've only noticed this happening when importing from iCloud. If you remember the name of one of the photos, you can search for it at the bottom left of the iPhoto window.

iPhoto and Aperture share the same library. And yes, as said above, anything you might need to do in iPhoto is only to be done in the program, not outside of it. If you need more detail on that let me know.