iphoto nightmare! Help a new member!

Ok well here is my story.. in detail.. and as many will be able to tell i am getting VERY frustrated !


Begining of the story.

My hardware :
Macbook
Airport extreme
External HD

Software:
i am running Tiger 10.4.11
Iphoto 6

Ok so here i am... with my macbook and iphoto

i started my iphoto library a couple years back when i got my macbook.. and i had the iphoto library on the macbook... i got about 5k pics on there and decided to move that library to my external HD...

i did.. and i started a new library on my macbook from scratch.. and switched when i needed to access the old photos..

did this 3 times.. never had any real issues ... just switched between the libraries at will..

AND THEN:

i got airport extreme ... so i decided to put together all of my libraries.. and store all future photos on my external HD using my airport wireless network deal to still use iphoto but store the pics on the external...

i think when i started exporting and then importing and then recovering and all back and forth from the external HD to internal HD is where this strange re-sizing of half my photos may have happened.. It made some of my 6000 or so photos 320x430 or some odd size like that..

all i really want is to clear my internal HD of all photos.. totally... problem is i can not find them.. i tried searching for any .jpg or .jpeg files and it never found any on the internal.. but its obvious they are there because when i open iphoto they all show up.. even when the external HD is not connected... and my internal HD is now 100% full after the latest re-import i tried to do...

and then the second thing i want to do is take all the full sized photos that are on my external HD and put them all in folders and delete all the freekin copies and shrunk copies on my external HD so i can organize everything IPHOTO free!


I don't want iphoto any more.. i just want my internal HD free of all these photos, and my external HD to have all my full sized images recovered so i can sort through them and organize them..

in short.. after all of this is resolved i want to do this :

every time i have new photos i want to use a card reader... so i can just save the photos to folders... view them with preview.. and edit them with photoshop CS2... that is all..

wow i know this seems like a mess of info but its hard to make it all clear when i am obviously not too terribly talented with my mac...

thanks in advance for any help and if there are any specifics i left out let me know so i can try to get this resolved!!

thanks!

just to clarify i have looked everywhere on my internal HD for the thousands of photos taht are visible when i open iphoto, which are also eating up all my internal HD space... i just can't seem to find them to delete them!!

I am not worried about losing the images... i know in one way or another i have every single photo i have ever taken stored within the depths of my external HD.. and i can make the effort to organize all of them and sort through them AFTER i get my internal HD space issue resolved.. simply deleting every single photo off the internal HD.

Cliffs:

-I want to delete all the image files off my notebook. this is made difficult because i KNOW there are lots of them on there but when i search i can't find any..and my "pictures" folder is empty.
-I don't want to use iphoto for images any more.
-I want to upload photos to the notebook from my card reader, view them with preview, and edit them with CS2.
-I want to store images on my external HD to save space on the internal
-I want to go in and sort through all the 23,000 photos on my external HD ( most of them copies and strange randomly shrunk copies of origional photos , only about 6000 are actual photos ) and delete all the unneeded copies of photos on the external HD to save clutter and confusion.

navigate to your home folder, than to your pictures folder and then you will see a file called iPhoto library, delete that, that is where all your photos are.

The Vindicat3d said:

navigate to your home folder, than to your pictures folder and then you will see a file called iPhoto library, delete that, that is where all your photos are.

Click to expand...

been there done that. lol

if it were there i wouldn't be posting. the library is not in the pictures folder.. or anywhere else on the internal HD that i can find.

Isn't there a way to resync your spotlight? Once you do that search again...

mac747 said:

Isn't there a way to resync your spotlight? Once you do that search again...

Click to expand...

your gonna have to dumb that down for me a bit.. lol

i have done the following things to try to find the library...

-i open mac HD
-i go to pictures folder... it is empty

in finder i click on the search box and i have searched for " .jpg" ".jpeg" "library""iphoto" and so on and so forth and haven't found a thing..

its gonna be a big file.. like 20 or 30 gig... is there any way i can search for BIG files on the HD using something different?? or is there something where i can search out all image files on the computer??

tia

so here is what i did...

i opened iphoto.. selected ALL ..

the held down ctrl and hit delete...

seemed to free up some HD space..

now all im going to do is use XEE to view photos... never touch iphoto again .. lol

i plan on breaking into the external HD and sorting through all that rubbish later on tonight and i guess i will just organize what photos aren't lost and start over.. as long as i can salvage the pictures of my late girlfriend i will be content.

its still a mystery to me where these photos were stored becase i used the crap out of spotlight to search for any and everything and never got a dang thing.. and the laptop wasn't running too great seeing as it had a 100% full hard drive..

thanks for the help that was offered..

When you use Iphoto. It not only edits your photo, but it also keeps the original file. When you go to export Iphoto to a hard drive. (Which I do all the time) you have an option to hoose which quality you would like to save the picture as. If you leave it at its default is will save as a small file. You always want to set your export as maximum quality. As far as the hard drive you should have a copy of the original, and a copy of the rendered. If you can find the originals Than all you have to do is reedit the picture and save them. As any photographer knows you should always keep your original photo (unaltered) in a safe place, at least backed up in four different places.

kc0ngg said:

When you use Iphoto. It not only edits your photo, but it also keeps the original file. When you go to export Iphoto to a hard drive. (Which I do all the time) you have an option to hoose which quality you would like to save the picture as. If you leave it at its default is will save as a small file. You always want to set your export as maximum quality. As far as the hard drive you should have a copy of the original, and a copy of the rendered. If you can find the originals Than all you have to do is reedit the picture and save them. As any photographer knows you should always keep your original photo (unaltered) in a safe place, at least backed up in four different places.

Click to expand...

Thanks so much! Im so glad to finally figure out what it was that changed my images! For some reason though i never saw a screen that said anything about image quality etc... strange enough.

luckily i do have a disc with my most precious images on it, although very few, at least if i have somehow lost all the full sized images i can still have the important ones in full size!

Im thinking that since i have not been EXPORTING the library in the past, simply dragging the library folder from internal HD to external HD.. i am guessing that my photos will be intact somewhere on the external HD. I plan on checking it out tonight and doing some arranging, hopefully solving all my problems!

slow91crx said:

Thanks so much! Im so glad to finally figure out what it was that changed my images! For some reason though i never saw a screen that said anything about image quality etc... strange enough.

luckily i do have a disc with my most precious images on it, although very few, at least if i have somehow lost all the full sized images i can still have the important ones in full size!

Im thinking that since i have not been EXPORTING the library in the past, simply dragging the library folder from internal HD to external HD.. i am guessing that my photos will be intact somewhere on the external HD. I plan on checking it out tonight and doing some arranging, hopefully solving all my problems!

Click to expand...

Yeah I use Iphoto almost religiously. I use it for my color control (to me it appears that my ability to control color in a photo is much greater than CS3( than I use CS3 for the rest. There is something about mac's algorithm that allows you to extraordinarily edit your photography. If you need help with settings and how to save, edit, blah blah blah than feel free to email me at [email protected]