IPhoto Confusion

July 2, 2011 9:36 AM

Be easy on me I'm basically clueless about Macs, but my PC died and I'm forced to work off my wife's computer 1)Where is my wife's Mac storing our pics? When I point Adobe Bridge at our Iphoto Library folder it doesn't see any pics. Instead it opens Iphoto. (note our IPhoto Library is in a dropbox folder). If I want to open them in Photoshop I have to drag the pic from IPhoto. How do I make this not be like this? 2) Can I use Dropbox as a remote library for the pics? I.E. delete them from the drive and just point Bridge at dropbox? Or is there a better solution? Would be happy to pay but need something that requires at most the ability to fog a mirror.
posted by JPD to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Best answer: So "iPhoto Library" on the Mac is a folder, but it is specially flagged to appear as a single file. It is in the best interest of your wife's photo library to *not* go futzing around in that folder. Apple chooses to abstract away the file system in its apps, and it's best to respect that.

You should only access these photos through iPhoto. If you would like to open them up in Photoshop, you can launch Photoshop, go to File Open, and in the lower left hand corner of the sidebar of the Open Dialog, there should be a section called Media with a section called Photos underneath it. If you select Photos, it will show you all the photos from iPhoto, and you can select one.
posted by AaRdVarK at 9:42 AM on July 2, 2011

Response by poster: Ok - problem one solved. I'm happy not to futz with things if I can avoid it. Any thoughts on problem two? I've should mention I've also got abot 750 gb of free space on the drive I've been using for "Timemachine" backups - can I move the library to that? (and also sync to dropbox off of that?)
posted by JPD at 9:54 AM on July 2, 2011

Hmm, that gets trickier. You can't use the Time Machine volume for data storage, but you could use Disk Utility to partition the drive it is on so you could use that extra partition to store the photo library. If you partitioned it, you could tell Dropbox to sync to that partition.
posted by AaRdVarK at 12:12 PM on July 2, 2011

Best answer: Use iPhoto instead of Bridge. In iPhoto, go to iPhoto > Preferences > General > Edit photo [in application...] and pick Photoshop.

Now, when you pick the photo and click 'edit', the photo will get passed to Photoshop, without any additional steps.
posted by Wild_Eep at 1:10 PM on July 3, 2011

Best answer: I'm pretty sure you can use the time machine drive for file storage. Anyway, I do.
posted by oddovid at 7:05 PM on July 3, 2011

Best answer: Seconding oddovid here; I use my external disk for Time Machine backups plus whatever else I feel like throwing on there. The only side effect is less space for backups.
posted by The Lurkers Support Me in Email at 2:32 PM on July 4, 2011

Best answer: Oh, also, files you store on your Time Machine drive won't be backed up by Time Machine. Putting your Dropbox on there should be fine, since you've got a cloud backup of that anyway.
posted by The Lurkers Support Me in Email at 2:36 PM on July 4, 2011

Response by poster: Perfect. Assuming co-mingling time machine with the other folders works I'm good to go.

Can't seem to partition the drive using the disk utility app, and I don't want to screw around with that to much until the other data is uploaded by dropbox.

Thanks.
posted by JPD at 9:41 AM on July 5, 2011

You shouldn't need to repartition the drive or anything. Time Machine keeps its stuff in a directory called "Backups.backupdb", just don't mess around with stuff in there and you'll be fine.
posted by The Lurkers Support Me in Email at 6:21 PM on July 10, 2011