I maintain my stamp collection records in Bento. One field is a media field containing the scanned photo of a stamp. To get the jpeg into Bento, it must come (I think) from the iPhoto Library. So, my question centers around getting the jpegs from the Desktop to iPhoto.
For the first several hundred stamps I simply dragged and dropped each jpeg into iPhoto from the Desktop. It seemed the natural thing to do these days. After processing the stamps into Bento, everything seemed fine. However, when in iPhoto, I get the message that the original is not available. Then it dawned on me that I probably should have been using File/Import to get the stamp jpegs into iPhoto rather than drag and drop. I’ve done that ever since.
Although Bento doesn’t seem to miss a beat, do I have a concern with respect to the thumbnails-only pictures vs. the real imported pictures? Is there anything I can do (or avoid doing) that will preserve the thumbnails without the originals?
— John Russell
Drag and drop should have created copies of the photos in the iPhoto library. You can check by looking inside the iPhoto library (see episode 364). You can probably figure out how things are arranged. Then look for those images to see if they are there or not. Or, just find the thumbnails and back those up -- you can even re-import them if you want.