iPhoto question

Hey everybody! Just a quick question, I originally put all of my photos into iPhoto when I moved everything from my PC when I picked up my iMac about 3 weeks ago but I wasnt really happy with iPhoto making copies of everything and what not, so after about a week or so I just decided to take everything in iPhoto and toss it into a folder on my desktop and sort them out in theyre own folders there. My question is if I go into iPhoto and delete everything there in the library will it remove them from the computer completely? Not just from iPhoto so I wont lose all of my pictures I'm kind of skeptical about doing this as I have about 7 years worth of photos and art projects and what not and be able just to keep them in this seperate folder.

Thanks in advance!

First off, deleting photos from iPhoto is a 2 step process. You first select the photos you want to delete and hit the Backspace or Delete key. But the photos aren't actually deleted until you Control (right) click on the little trash icon and select Empty Trash in the column on the left in iPhoto.

That being said, if you select your Photo Library from the list on the left (it's the top item in the list) and go under the File menu and select Export, iPhoto will COPY all the photos to the folder you specify on your drive. These are COPIES. That means you can safely delete the entire iPhoto library either in iPhoto itself, or in the Finder in the User/Pictures folder. This will NOT affect the exported folder of your photos you just created.

so do I still need to export them to another folder even if I already have them copied to a folder on desktop?

If you have already copied them and your sure they are copies and are not within the iphoto folder then your are ok to delete.

May I ask what are you going to use instead of iphoto? Me too dont like the way it works with duplicated files

yeah what I did was just select them all in my iphoto library and then just dragged them to a new folder which should have copied them seperatley to the new folder...that should be ok right?

Actually I dont think I'll use any programs I'll just keep them in my folder the way I have them now It's the one thing I'm still hanging onto from my windows habits lol I just feel more comfortable knowing EXACTLY where everything is...besides I have photoshop with all of the plug-ins so any editing I do is done stritcly in Photoshop!

I assume you're using the latest version of iPhoto. If you are, you can go to the preferences in the Advanced tab and turn off the option to copy files to the iPhoto Library folder. iPhoto will just leave the photos in whatever folder you have them in and just allow you to work with them from there. Essentially, it works just like iTunes with your music library.