iPhoto library - Am I completely missing the point?

[hoogie]

Hi All,

I moved to Mac a few months ago and I’m feeling settled with most aspects of the OS and Software, however I am finding myself completely lost with iPhoto and how it manages photos...

Fundamentally my main problem is that iPhoto makes a duplicate copy of my pictures when importing them and saves it in a different library location, which I didn't know was happening.

As a result I now have a load of pictures stored as I would expect in my pictures folder, duplicates in the iPhoto library and a large amount of new pictures in the iPhoto library but not in my Pictures folder.

A few questions:

1) Why does iPhoto behave like this? Does it offer any benefits?

2) The iPhoto library seems not to use my original folder names, so navigating the library structure is a nightmare. Is there a way around this?

3) Is there a way to easily re-structure to a more standard approach with my photos in their normal locations?

Thanks for any advice.

 

[hoogie]

It's quite interesting that I have found this "Apple wanting to manage data for me" as the hardest thing to adapt to.

I have done it with iTunes and find it ok as it is structured by Author/Artist/Film etc and I can easily navigate if I ever had to. But with photos losing all folder names and ability to manually navigate scare the hell out of me...

What if I ever wanted to return to Windows, how would I go about getting my pictures back into a normal structure?

I suspect I may disable the "import to iPhoto" setting and keep my files in their original location, however if I do that I will have to manually find and move all photos that I have imported to iPhoto since getting my Mac, which will be very time consuming