No question that Mac’s OSes do a great job of making organization easy. But when I get the urge to move or copy (backup) pictures and movies to another drive, I’m always afraid that somewhere in the system there are hidden files that get confused when I do that. Am I leaving behind info that’s important to the Mac? Is there a published map someplace that shows all the places that iMovie and iPhoto keep files, especially ones the user needs to know about? Short of that, would you consider being our house guest over the New Year’s holiday :-) ?
— John Russell
There's really not that much to it. iPhoto stores all of its files in the iPhoto library "package." iMovie stores events in the iMovie events folder and projects in the iMovie projects folder. I usually name my event and project the same so I can archive an entire project with just those two folders. That's all you need. And with iPhoto you can grab the originals -- but that won't keep any of your photo alterations or croppings. I prefer to keep all my photos in my iPhoto library -- otherwise features like tagging and faces are useless since I can't search through all of my photos. I've got 10,000+ from the last 10 years in there.
Gary,
Thanks, I have been struggling with multiple video projects and thought most of this was helpful. So, if I have three different cameras, I can save jpgs, mp4, mov etc all files to the one "project" file to iphoto and one to imovie. I also just bought an app called Araxix Find Duplicate Files to thin out my saved pics and movie files. Another question: if I am using an external HD just to store movie files, every time I download them, especially if they were part of another download, then I will have duplicate content, ? Is that correct?
Thanks Gary,
Clay
The first question: There are many ways to arrange and organize your media files, both inside or outside of iPhoto/iMovie. Second question: I don't understand, if they are on a hard drive, why are you downloading them again?