Photo hell!

[adamdm]

Just got back from a 7-night Caribbean cruise with a new camera, and my 8-month old 1st Mac (13" MPB, late '11)

I took my photos in dual-mode JPG and RAW formats. I don't really know what use I might have for having the RAW files but I thought that it might be something I might want to work with down the road.

My main reason for posting is that I don't really understand where to start in terms of viewing and working with my photos on my MBP.

I have been trying to use iPhoto for a while now but have been unsure about how to use it. During my vacation, every few days, I stuck in the SD card from my camera and created an event in iPhoto (Cruise Vacation 2012) and would offload the pics and delete.

The first thing that confused/confuses me is that I created an event the first time I did this called "Cruise Vacation 2012" but when I would offload pics in subsequent sessions I wasn't 100% sure if I was supposed to create a new event or just keep adding in to the other one (the latter seemed like what I would have WANTED to do).

Now when I open iPhoto, there is a listing under "Recent" for Cruise Vacation 2012 but when I click on that not all of the pictures are in there. (It appears to be only the photos from the first 2 days of the vacation.) When I go in the Events section under "Library", I see several different events titled Cruise Vacation 2012...I guess I need to merge these somehow?

My second stumbling block is that I don't know as I move through these pictures if I am previewing the RAW file or the JPG file. What I feel like would be ideal to do is to work with the JPGs and move the RAW files somewhere else for safe keeping if I want to do additional processing on them later. Then, I would like to move through all the JPGs...delete the bad ones...and then upload the ones that I feel are presentable to the Dropbox account so that the whole group can advise.

So, in summary...I'm looking for some resources on how to get the most out of iPhoto...and/or to know if I need to be looking at a different solution.

Any help appreciated. Thanks!

 

[adamdm]

Also...I have 4 GB of RAM. And I feel like I "beach ball" a lot -- especially in iPhoto. Is that to be expected with 4 GB? Are there settings I need to be looking at to make sure that my memory resources are properly allocated? Or is it just the fact that I usually have 20 tabs open in Safari at any given time? LOL

 

[Kaveman]

I guess I need to merge these somehow?

Just drag the additional Events on top of the First Event to merge them. On the Mac, always try Drag and Drop.

Show the Info panel and it has the File Type.

Personally I only use RAW, the additional JPG photos are unneeded duplicates. iPhoto turns them into good JPGs if you Drag and Drop them out onto the desktop.

No you shouldn't be getting the beachball, I'm guessing you need to let iPhoto finish it indexing, but there are things you can try in the maintenance mode. Restart iPhoto with command and option held down.

iPhoto is a great photo management system, we have a huge number of photos and no problems.

More info at Apple Support Videos
http://support.apple.com/videos/#iphoto

 

[adamdm]

I've got like 2500 pics in here (just from this event).

You're saying I don't need to keep copies of the JPGs, which makes sense.

So I finally figured out how to go into Finder so I could more systematically delete duplicate JPGs that were downloaded from the camera. I deleted some, but they're still showing up in iPhoto. Further research seems to indicate that this may not have been the best way to do this...but I'm trying to get these pictures down to a manageable number so I can start making decisions about which ones I want to keep, which ones I want to tweak, etc. My friends/family are already wondering what is taking so long lol