Managing pictures, kind regards perfectionist

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Hi!

Im extremely new to the iOs-way of thinking, so in advance, I'm so sorry, be gentle.

Anyways.. Im a keen perfectionist when it comes to managing and grouping of pictures, and I've been doing it since i was... well... 10 years old or something. I have pictures from the last 15 years, grouped after year -> month -> event -> Who took the pictures. This is a great way of sorting pictures! The problem is, this christmas i got a macbook pro, because lets face it, apple has taken over the world, and my brilliant system is falling to the grounds. I have them as they are supposed to be in the finder, but i can not "browse" and delete as I go, within the folders I´ve made earlier. Importing things to iPhoto just messes everything up. grouping things in the last folders of "the tree", grouping after date... NO NO NO! Not how i want it.

I have seen a lot of other posts about this topic, but none seem to have any answer. Can anybody who remembers the awful switching-from-windows-to-iOs-time rescue me?
 
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Hello and welcome to the forum! :)

You really need to provide us some useful information, e.g. you mention a Macbook Pro and then iOS - the laptop would have OS X installed (e.g. Mavericks or Yosemite), while iOS is the operating system used on iDevices, such as the iPad or iPhone.

Please clarify - the first post in THIS THREAD might help. Dave
 
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Trying to clarify

Ahaaa, used to iPhone, iPad and iPod, so that explains the "iOs". But of course there is no iOs.

It´s a macBook Pro Retina with OS X Mavericks, software OS X 10.9.5 (13F34).

The problem is that i miss the way i organised pictures when i was using the windows explorer, and simply deleted what i didn't need as i browsed through my pictures with the picture manager, and rotated when i wanted to, without it having to be in special folders like in iPhoto. The iPhoto doesn't allow me to have "a tree" of folders sorted by year -> month -> event. I wanna be able to do this, without using a separate program that ruins the structure of my "photo library". Doing this in the preview would be perfect, but I'm not allowed to delete and rotate when I'm in the preview app.

All my photos, collected through the last 15 years, are on my external hard drive, and i would like to keep it that way.
 
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chas_m

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Actually, iPhoto does in fact sort photos in EXACTLY the manner you describe -- year, month, event. It does not automatically go the extra step in tagging who took the photo, but that can be done fairly easily with keywords or through "smart albums" of photos taken by a particular camera.

However, if you prefer to manage the pictures yourself, you can certainly do that in iPhoto. Just uncheck the "add photos to iPhoto Library" and instead its library will only add a reference marker to wherever you have them stored, and will not rearrange the actual photos. I'm not sure if you can do this "mid-stream," however, and you may need to start a new Library file (you can have as many as you like) that's set by default to leave the photo organization up to you -- I've always been perfectly happy with iPhoto's method, since it is the same one I've always used -- year/month/event.

More importantly, however is that the main concept behind iPhoto's default behaviour is that it really doesn't matter how iPhoto internally organizes the pictures -- you can view them in nearly any way you like, though the default is by events (photos taken at roughly the same time auto-grouped together).

To me, this is a far smarter way of doing things -- on-the-fly, for example, I can find every picture I've ever taken of a relative, either automatically by using the "Faces" feature or being diligent about tagging photos with that person in them with a keyword of their name. That way, the same photo can be in multiple albums and I don't have to decide if I want to re-organize my entire collection just to have all the "Uncle Bob" pictures in one place or not. The iPhoto program can present to me a view of my photos by nearly any criteria imaginable -- through Smart Albums, for example, I could have a view that showed me all photos taken on a specific Nikon where the flash was used between May of 2001 and September of 2004!
 
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It does sound smart indeed.

So now I've unchecked the "Copy photos to library" and made a new library file, called iPhoto_library_2014 (a tester). I imported all the photos from 2014 into this library, so its now a reference library for 2014. however, the folders that are shown in iPhoto now are the "down most" folders of every category. If I for instances have 2014 -> 06 -> Trip to the US -> New York - > Week 1, the iPhoto only shows the "Week 1"-folder. Do I have to make folders and albums manually? There is no way that iPhoto automatically can arrange the folders and files (or pointers) as I have them on my external HDD?

And then the next issue, when i tried to delete a photo in iPhoto, that i don't want, and i will never wanna have it again, it doesn't disappear from the original folder on my ex. HDD. Is it merely a photo-viewing-tool when I use reference libraries?
 

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