On the surface, iPhoto is amazingly easy to use, considering the amazing stuff you can do with it. But what’s going on behind the scenes, and where is it going on?

Let’s say you’re hooking up your new digital camera to your Mac for the first time, after taking a whole memory card full of photos in December of 2004. You attach the cable (or load the memory card into the card reader), iPhoto opens, and imports the images. Where did they go?

iPhoto creates a folder in your Home folder > Pictures folder called “iPhoto Library”. All the photos you just imported are inside this folder. iPhoto looks at the date each photo was taken (which is part of the metadata added to the image as it is created in the camera), and creates a separate folder for the year, month, and day recorded on every photo imported into it. So, in our above example, if you open the “2004” folder, you’ll find a subfolder labeled “12”, for December. Inside the “12” folder, for every day in December you took a photo, you’ll find a subfolder labeled for the day of the month you took the photo. In order to make iPhoto run faster, iPhoto also creates a thumbnail version of each photo and stores it in a “Thumbs” folder within each day’s folder. If you never edit a photo within iPhoto, the photo will stay in that day’s folder.

But, of course, you’ll want to use iPhoto’s editing features to improve the photo. Let’s say you crop the photo, then change the saturation using iPhoto’s Advanced Editing Dashboard. When you save the changes, iPhoto makes a copy of the original image and places it into a new folder it creates in the day’s folder called “Originals”. So now, within the day’s folder you’ll find: an image with the same name as the original image, but reflecting the editing you’ve done; an “Originals” folder containing the image as it came off the camera; and, the aforementioned “Thumbs” folder, which now amazingly reflects the editing you’ve done.

If you don’t like what you’ve just done during the editing process, even if you’ve “saved the changes”, you can always get to the original by selecting “Revert to Original” from the “Photos” menu. Simple, eh?

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski