iLife forum: Transferring photos from PC to a new Mac

and let iPhoto organize them for you.

Using a thumbdrive, copy all your pictures from your PC to the Pictures folder on your mac.
Open iPhoto and allow it to import all those picture into its database.

If you do it one folder at time, you will be able to import them and arrange them at the same time.

P

will organize your pictures into albums (folders) regardless of where they are stored on your Mac. It will be you who decides what pictures belong in what album (Folder) inside of iPhoto

I'm not sure what you think the advantage of storing your pictures in different folders may be, but once your pictures are in the iPhoto database, you can organize them in any way that you see fit.
iPhoto uses something called Events to arrange pictures, along with Smart Albums and manually populated albums.
Creating albums, call them folders if you want, you can move any newly imported pictures into whatever album you desire.
Rather like a regular book library, iPhoto stores ALL of your pictures in one library which is then divided into events and albums.

If you really feel the need to keep your pictures separated into separate folders outside of iPhoto, then you can continue to do so, it makes no difference to iPhoto.

From within iPhoto, you can email the pictures, edit them, send them off to flickr, print them and easily find them using the search function.
iPhoto also has facial recognition software which is a neat thing.

As to your last question, when you import from your camera into iPhoto, there is no way to tell iPhoto that you want something to be in a certain folder. It displays your last import and then you just select them and drag them to their relevant albums.

Just out of curiosity, what advantage do you see in having you pictures in separate folders?

P

Ponder this:
Move a single folder into the Pictures folder on the Mac.
Open iPhoto and "Import to Library", choosing that folder as the source
Create an Album, "Select All" from the last import and drag them to the Album

Repeat until done.

12,000 is a fair number but not so large or unusual a collection.

P

I recently made a collection of digital photos for friends on my windows pc, and put them in the mail on cds. One friend has an old Mac and can't open the pictures. Any suggestions? I don't want to send a thumb drive, and there are too many pictures for email.

JPG/JPEG files can be opened on any Mac, old or not.


P

Is the CD burn properly finalizing the session. That's usually something that doesn't read on the mac if it's left open for later appending. This is also a common symptom of cds burned with packet-writing.

Thanks people. I'm relieved to hear I don't need to buy any special software. I will make another cd for her and close the session. Hopefully this does the trick!

I have to make a new cd for my friend and see if she can open it. I will tell you if it works!