Saturday, February 20, 2010

File Structure on Mac OS X

The one thing that took me a while to get use to is the way in which sorting files is done.  iTunes and iPhoto are similar in this way.  For example, while on Windows I had all my songs in folders arranged by album.  Then I had albums by the same artist in a folder under that artist's name.  Then I had a higher level folder that was the genre, say Classical, and that had all the Classical artists in it.  And so on.  

This is normal on Windows.  But Apple have moved away from this hierarchical folder system to make it easier for the user.  So when I moved to the Mac, I just dumped everything into iTunes and let iTunes figure out how to sort it.  I did have to add some tags and things such as genres.  This did take a long time but it is so much easier to find and play music I want to listen to.

So the idea is that you put all your photos into iPhoto and then tag them to sort them.  So instead of finding the "family" folder and sub-folders inside that folder, Apple wants you to let it do all the sorting of folders so that you don't have to worry about any of that.  You just have to worry about arranging them inside iPhoto with tags.  

I suppose the way you should look at it is that iPhoto is a program to sort and view your photos and Photoshop is for doing editing and alterations.  iPhoto can do basic editing like cropping and removing red eye, but really it's power is in sorting and viewing.

Don't forget about the tips on the Apple website.  They'll be a great help to understanding aspects of iPhoto and your Mac in general.

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