Between Halloween, Thanksgiving, a plethora of December holidays and New Years, ’tis the season for photo management. But if you use iPhoto, can you use your photos outside of iPhoto? Before iPhoto ‘08 (version 7.0), you could easily navigate to your iPhoto Library in the finder or an Open File dialog, find the photo you want and open it, upload it to a website, or use it the same ways you did before iPhoto ‘08. Now, if you navigate to the iPhoto Library, instead of a directory full of photos organized by date, you’re confronted with a single icon.
Luckily, there are some simple strategies for getting to your photos if you want to get to them through the file system.
First, you can still navigate to your image folders through the Finder. Open a Finder window, and go to Pictures→iPhoto Library. You’ll find the iPhoto icon, but no subfolders.
Next, right click (or Control-Click) on the icon to bring up a menu of options. Select “Show Package Contents” from this menu:
Once you select this option, a new Finder window will open with all of the familiar iPhoto subfolders that you can navigate to your heart’s content.
This is great if you can do what you need through the finder, but what happens when you try to do something like open a photo within an application - for example, through a dialog when uploading a photo to a website in Safari. An Open File dialog pops up, and you see the same iPhoto icon, but it’s greyed out so our right-clicking technique won’t work here.
The first thing you’ll need to do is open iPhoto (or the iPhoto Library in the finder, as described above), and locate the photo you’d like to open. Next, click the icon (either in iPhoto or the Finder) and drag it on top of the Open window. A red circle with the number of photos you’ve selected will pop up on top of the icon you’re dragging:
Release the mouse button, and the Open dialog window will now point to the photo you want to open.
In fact, if you happened to drag the wrong photo in, you can now navigate through this directory at will, too:
2 comments ↓
Hi. Thanks for this info on getting files out of iPhoto. One question. When I follow your instructions to open a finder to navigate through my photo folders, the finder does not contain any of the photo files that I downloaded since getting iPhoto 08. Only all the stuff from the previous version of iPhoto. Any thoughts?
I’m really pleased to be able to get behind the iphoto structure, but am specifically trying to find the file relating to a photo book that I have created - any ideas about how to find this? Maybe I’m missing something, but can’t see anything that relates to projects or books
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