What's new
Photoshop Gurus Forum

Welcome to Photoshop Gurus forum. Register a free account today to become a member! It's completely free. Once signed in, you'll enjoy an ad-free experience and be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

IPhoto and Photoshop Elements 13


Yvonne

Member
Messages
12
Likes
2
Hi, I have just purchased Photoshop Elements 13 - my first Photoshop experience! I currently use iPhoto to organise my photos and am thinking of using Photoshop Organiser instead.

My question is, if I import my photos from iPhoto to Photoshop, does it actually move them or does it just make a copy and leave the originals behind in iPhoto? I would really like to be sure that I like the way Photoshop Organiser works before permanently moving over 3,000 photos. I use the most up-to-date version of iPhoto.

Thank you - I am sure this will just be the first of many questions! :rolleyes:
 

IamSam

Administrator
Staff member
Administrator
Messages
22,721
Likes
13,258
Hi Yvonne and welcome to PSG.

I really don't want to misinform you on this matter. I'm a serial mac user................but I steer away from iPhoto.

Here's what I just tried. I opened an event (folder) that contained five photos. I then selected them and used FILE > EXPORT to export the photos to my desktop. It looks like iPhoto just copied them because the images appeared in both places.

I have no experience at all with Elements Organizer. After looking at it, it would seem that it very similar to iPhoto.

I use Adobe Bridge.
 

Tom Mann

Guru
Messages
7,223
Likes
4,343
Hi Yvonne, and a big welcome from me, as well.

OP: "...My question is, if I import my photos from iPhoto to Photoshop, does it actually move them or does it just make a copy and leave the originals behind in iPhoto?..."

I'm 99% sure that Elements works just like it's big brother, Adobe Lightroom, with respect to the storage location(s) for photos: Importing a photo into LR (or Elements) does not move the originals. It merely generates a new entry in its image database that points to the image's current location. It doesn't copy, and it doesn't move the original image files. I have well over 200,000 images cataloged in LR (and in a couple of other image database systems), and I would never use any other system.

I'm not a Mac person at all, and never have used iPhoto even once in my life, but prompted by your question, I looked up how iPhoto stores photos. From what I read, in contrast to how LR/Elements work, when iPhoto imports a photo, it makes a copy of the image (not just a pointer to it) in a dedicated folder called an iPhoto "Package". This approach has some benefits, especially for small collections and inexperienced users, but, for many reasons, I would never want to be bound to such a rigid system.

Unfortunately, I don't know anything about the internal structure of an iPhoto Package folder. For example, I don't know if iPhoto might do something weird like attempt to compress all your images into groups, so I don't know if Elements Organizer will have any problem reading the contents of this / these packages since it is expecting to import ordinary image files (eg, JPGs, PNGs, TIFFs, NEFs, CR2s, etc.). Obviously, with the imminent demise of iPhoto, I suspect a lot of people have been migrating to Elements, so there is probably a lot of discussion on the internet on this exact concern. It should also be very easy for you to use Finder and look inside the package folder and make sure you see files of the types mentioned above.

HTH,

Tom M
 

Yvonne

Member
Messages
12
Likes
2
Thank you both for taking the time to help. I have recently started using Lightroom and it took me a while to get my head around how it stores/access your photos because I have always used iPhoto which, as you say, works quite differently. If Elements works in the same way as Lightroom, I guess my original idea of importing into Elements then getting rid of iPhoto altogether might lead to disaster!

Yvonne.
 

Tom Mann

Guru
Messages
7,223
Likes
4,343
Yvonne - re: "...If Elements works in the same way as Lightroom, I guess my original idea of importing into Elements then getting rid of iPhoto altogether might lead to disaster!..."

I'm not sure why you are worried about this possibility. Unless I'm missing something, I think that the very worst that could happen would be that LR or Elements simply wouldn't be able to identify some or all the pix in iPhoto's Folder package, and so they wouldn't be visible in those programs. Neither LR nor Elements would never attempt to delete, move or do anything else disruptive to them during the importing process unless you explicitly told it to do so.

Oh, BTW, if you have LR, I ***STRONGLY*** suggest that you give it another go as your image manager. It's a bit more complicated than the organizer in Elements, but it is vastly more powerful. I can't recommend it highly enough.

If you don't want to do this, my second choice for locating images would be the free program from Google, "Picasa". I use it all the time when I don't need to execute a complicated search on my images. It's absolutely bullet proof.

However, with respect to tweaking photos, I just can't recommend Picasa. Once again, LR probably does 80% of what most pro photographers need, and the rest can be done by editing in either Elements or the full version of PS.

HTH,

Tom M
 

Yvonne

Member
Messages
12
Likes
2
I suppose I was just thinking that, if Elements doesn't actually 'move' the photos from iPhoto but just links to them, then I delete the photos in iPhoto thinking they are stored in Elements, I could end up deleting my actual photos. But from what you say, I think I have misunderstood how it all works (again). I just don't find Lightroom very user friendly as an image manager, probably because I am more used to the 'look' of iPhoto. I will consider it again if you recommend it. I am very new to serious photography, I have gone from using a point and shoot camera and iPhoto to getting to grips with a DSLR and Lightroom over the course of just a few weeks so have some catching up to do - I'm sure I will get there in the end!

Thanks for your help once again.
 

apoteke

New Member
Messages
3
Likes
0
Tom and Yvonne

I suppose I was just thinking that, if Elements doesn't actually 'move' the photos from iPhoto but just links to them, then I delete the photos in iPhoto thinking they are stored in Elements, I could end up deleting my actual photos. But from what you say, I think I have misunderstood how it all works (again). I just don't find Lightroom very user friendly as an image manager, probably because I am more used to the 'look' of iPhoto. I will consider it again if you recommend it. I am very new to serious photography, I have gone from using a point and shoot camera and iPhoto to getting to grips with a DSLR and Lightroom over the course of just a few weeks so have some catching up to do - I'm sure I will get there in the end!

Thanks for your help once again.

I have found that when you import from iPhoto to organizer you get all the images dated based on the day they were imported. You can see the date taken in the exif data but I can't imagine why they would sort images any other way than date taken. I guess what I really mean I can't understand why sorting them by date taken isn't an option. Is there a way around this?

I'd just keep using iPhoto for my pictures, but I like that when you edit an image in elements and then save it it gets saved as a set in organizer. I also like that in organizer you don't actually move the file. You can store the photos anywhere you want and then organizer only points to where that image is.
Any thoughts on the best way to go?
Thanks
John
 

Tom Mann

Guru
Messages
7,223
Likes
4,343
Unfortunately, Apoteke, I don't use Elements, and I don't even own a copy, so I can't speak authoritatively on this, but from what I've read about it on the web, its "organizer" module looks like it works very similarly to the corresponding features in Lightroom.

In LR, there is a very nice little menu to change what you are sorting on:

LR_sort_options.jpg

HTH,

Tom M
 

apoteke

New Member
Messages
3
Likes
0
Hello everybody and I believe I spoke incorrectly. It took a lot of looking but I believe I know what happened. I have about 10% of my pictures that didn't have good metadata. A lot of them were pictures I scanned from before having a digital camera. I started with about 1750 images that were all dated the import date. These were photos that were mostly imported from iPhoto. As I go through them I have found a way to change the date. What made it much easier was when I went to grid view. Then the date was below each image instead of the images all bunched together. The menu in organizer 13 has the choice of sorting 1. by date 2. by Keyword, 3. by title 4. by rating and manually. You can also do ascending and descending. so it doesn't have as many choices. Thanks for the response though
 

Top