Mac users - iPhoto

[paddlenbike]

I have digital photos dating back to 1999. 67 GB worth, more than 60,000 photos, all neatly organized in roughly 100+ folders by date and location. (Example: 2014-08 - Signal Peak 4x4 trail.) Now that I have made the move to Mac, I am not sure I want to forego my file system and just dump it all into iPhoto, where it organizes for you in one master file (called "managed library"). I see that iPhoto has an option for "Referenced Library," where it keeps your file/folder structure intact. For those of you that have thousands of neatly managed photos, is there any reason for me to NOT go the "referenced library" way, or is that just my old-school Windows "do it myself the hard way" habit speaking up?

[4x4mike]

You lost me at 1999. My drivers license was still warm from the DMV and gas was $1.00 in '99.

I tend to keep very few pictures on an actual computer. Throughout the years, like many years after 1999, we've had several computers, many cameras and external drives. Dumping them on a computer isn't very useful for me so I haven't explored it. I have an s-ton of pictures on my Picasa, a maxed out photobucket, flickr and an old shutterfly account. I like being able to access things from online accounts. Pictures I like/matter/want to keep original file size get uploaded to external drives and live in the safe.

[Robinhood4x4]

I can't help you with iphoto, but I organize my photos the same way. Does iphoto automatically back it up somewhere? If not, I don't see any reason to change.

[paddlenbike]

Unless you have a Time Machine, I don't believe it backs anything up.

[Good Times]

I used to use iPhoto but gave up using it years ago because it just wasn't working with the workflow for all of the photo stuff I do. I know iPhoto has come a long way but I'm also stubborn so here's what I do.

All of my raw files are on an external RAID configured hard drives. This ensures that I'll never lose any data and also I get to keep the old school Windows file/folder structure that I was used to (kinda similar to what you have it setup as). I store all of my jpg's on flickr (1tb free!) so at a minimum I'll never lose the jpgs too.

To view images I just use the finder and/or preview. For photo editing I use either Capture NX and/or Aperature.

More recently I have tried to not store anything on my laptops. I've had problems with one device or another and have been slowly moving to either the cloud and/or external devices to store my data. This ensures that if my laptop or any other device takes a dump I never lose my data. I also use Time Machine to perform all of my backups but I use TM more for backing up my apps that I've collected over the years.

Hope this helps! Probably not huh!

[paddlenbike]

The "image library" concept of having all of my photos stored in one image database file scares me a little. It's sort of an iTunes type approach, only in iTunes you can get to the raw files. I think I will stick with my old Windows-style directory storage and use the iPhoto "referenced library" to achieve that. I do plan to get Aperature at some point, so it's nice to know it will be happy with either storage system.

I've been using a RAID network attached storage at home but I'm beginning to wonder if it's a good idea to have your backups connected to the internet where it could get hacked or possibly virus-ridden. The combination of that concern as well as the constant power draw caused me to leave it off. Now I have to turn it on and backup manually, which defeats the whole point. I recently bought a simple 1TB Toshiba USB external HD to replace the NAS and bought 100GB of storage @ Google Picasa.

I like everything about the Mac so far, but I think I want to maintain that old-school Windows file structure for my photos. I'd be irate if that one iPhoto master file got corrupted and I lost my photos. Thanks Lance!

[DHC6twinotter]

I hate iPhoto and how it dumps all your photos together. You can set up albums and folders in iPhoto, but it's really cumbersome and doesn't work that well. If you set up albums and folders, it still has your photos grouped together in the "recent" category, and if you have thousands of photos in there like I do, it bogs the computer down when it opens (at least on mine it does).

I changed the setting in iPhoto so it no longer automatically opens when I have an SD card or camera connected. I prefer to just set up folders in the photos folder like I would on a Windows PC. Much easier, imho.

iPhoto has some nice features, like the fascial recognition (I never used it though), but as a whole, I think it's pretty terrible.

[paddlenbike]

Thanks for everyone's input. I'll go the "referenced library" route, then iPhoto behaves like a normal photo viewer.

Loving the Mac so far; everything I have setup just works. New router was plug and play, wireless printing on our 4 year old Canon was completely painless and the other day when I opened the image capture utility just to see what it was, I was surprised to see a little thumbnail image of our exact Canon printer/scan/copy machine. I clicked on it and what do you know, it started scanning wirelessly. I have spent hours upon hours the past four years trying to get that feature to work on our PCs, and it never did work. The Mac somehow just did it. I love that.