mrarroyo,
I'm not sure why, but iPhoto seems to throw off a lot of switchers the first time they use it. I think the likely cause is that it works so different from anything on Windows. I often describe it to people as iTunes for pictures. What exactly do I mean by that? Allow me to explain.
I'm assuming you've used iTunes and you know how it works. You open up the app and it shows you all of the music in your library. The music is sorted in a number of ways: song title, artist, album, and genre to name a few of the big ones. If you want to play a song, you find it in the library within the app itself and hit play. Simple and easy. You don't have to dig into folders upon folders in the Finder (or Windows Explorer on Windows) and locate the file itself in order to play it. In fact, you can even have iTunes organize the library in the Finder for you automatically so that you know exactly where everything is.
iPhoto works in a similar fashion. Rather than access all of your photos by digging into a file hierarchy system, you simply open up iPhoto, which will display all of the pictures in your library automatically. Photos are primarily sorted by Events, which is really not that different from what most people use on their Windows PC. (
Example: I put all of our Florida vacation photos in this one folder.) It's just called something else and looks a bit different. With a little extra effort you can also sort photos by who is in them (Faces) and where they were taken (Places). You have the ability to manipulate the Events however you like. You can add pictures to them, split photos off into a separate Event, or delete them from the library altogether. However, you do this in the app itself, not in the Finder.
This may sound disturbing at first until you realize that once you have everything all set up, you'll
always go into iPhoto to look at your pictures in much the same way you'll always go to iTunes to listen to your music. It's just easier to have a visual representation of each of your photo events rather than rely on thumbnails in the Finder to locate everything. In the end, there's little need to have access to the actual files themselves in the Finder. If you want to share a photo, there's a number of ways to do so built right into the app. If you want to create an external folder in the Finder with the pictures from an Event, you can Export them. It's really a powerful and useful tool. I consider it to be one of the best apps included on the Mac.
I suggest you take a look at the
video tutorials on the Apple website to get a better idea of how iPhoto works and exactly what you can do with it. Most of all give it a fair shake before throwing up your hands and admitting defeat. I really do think you will find it a better way to enjoy the photos you take. Good luck.
I have about 7 gigs of pictures fully organized on an external USB HD that I used w/ my previous PC. Well I imported them in and iPhoto re-organized the files and set up a bunch of folders in the events section.
