Mac Forum / Country Specific / Australian Mac Group / February 2005

I've never used a Mac with iPhoto so I'm just guessing here, but if you
have the computers networked, can't you just highlight, drag, and drop
the files that you want to transfer into the relevant folder on the Mac?
(using Explorer or whatever the Mac equivalent of that is)

I find it useful to think that iPhoto has its own model of how it
organises your pictures and presents them to you.  It imports the photos
into its database and then gives you different ways of looking at those
photos, whether by searching, by film roll, by folders which you
organise, and so on.

If I understand what you're saying, you want to be able to organise the
database that iPhoto uses in the filesystem by hand and I don't know how
to do that, or if that's even possible.

If you want to use iPhoto to manage your photos, I'd try doing it using
its model of the world.  I'd let it import the photos itself and then
create folders inside iPhoto called "1845" etc which have the photos
that you want in them -- just drag them into your folder from the
library.  This has the advantage that if you also wanted to use those
photos in different groupings, say all pictures which include a
particular person, you could also drag them into a folder that you've
created for that purpose.  That gets complex when you have the photos in
the file system.

As an aside, I find the comments area that's associated with each photo
to be fantastic for annotating photos.  You might have to click the
"info" button in the bottom left twice to bring it up, then start typing
in the text input box there.  You can have the comments included when
you export the photos to a web page which is great.

When you want to put the photos in your genealogy program, just drag
them from the iPhoto library into your application.

Hope this helps.

  Ben.