I don't really understand iphoto. It duplicates all my photo files. Should I delete the original photo libraries I created myself? Thanks for the help.
You can do it however you wish. Yes, iPhoto duplicates, not moves, your photos into its own library system. Some people like it that way, others hate it.
It basically boils down to whether you want to let iPhoto handle your photos from now on, or whether you want to do it manually as well outside of it. If the former, just delete the photos after you've imported them into iPhoto. If the latter, leave them.
I would keep both sets. iPhoto has been known to delete photo's without warning. people have lost their entire photo library. I keep 2 sets of photo's. one set in my own folder system (year/month/day) and the other in iPhoto.
If you decide to just use iPhoto (which allows you to revert back to the orginal which is a nice feature, even if you edit it in Photoshop by selecting "Edit in External Editor"). BACKUP your orginals in their folder setup you made just in case.
After using iPhoto since the day it was introduced, I don't see how it's possible for iPhoto to "just delete" someone's photos without SOME user input... in which case the user did something wrong.
In any case, I let iPhoto do all the work for me, and regularly use "Backup" to archive everything. I also occasionally drag the "Pictures" folder to a separate hard-drive to create another back-up of everything. I think the fact that I have all these backups is what keeps "Murphy" from bothering me
Thank you for the help. I could probably go ahead and delete my original files because they are all on both of my windows machines too. Thanks for all the tips.
Comments
It basically boils down to whether you want to let iPhoto handle your photos from now on, or whether you want to do it manually as well outside of it. If the former, just delete the photos after you've imported them into iPhoto. If the latter, leave them.
If you decide to just use iPhoto (which allows you to revert back to the orginal which is a nice feature, even if you edit it in Photoshop by selecting "Edit in External Editor"). BACKUP your orginals in their folder setup you made just in case.
In any case, I let iPhoto do all the work for me, and regularly use "Backup" to archive everything. I also occasionally drag the "Pictures" folder to a separate hard-drive to create another back-up of everything. I think the fact that I have all these backups is what keeps "Murphy" from bothering me