For those of you that know me – this is a BIG deal – HUGE!  But, for those of you that know me, you can get up off of the floor.  I didn’t say I was giving up control of everything. I haven’t lost it quite that bad yet.

Trying to give up my PC ways is hard.  I’ve been trained for years now.  I like to minimize the control that a computer has over me.  I back up my files (almost regularly) and I am a true believer of the “if you can’t fix it, trick it” motto of the PC world.  I’m thinking that this motto won’t work in the Mac world.

I’ve recently noticed that when I hook up my camera, my Mac takes over and wants to download my photos.  Actually, it’s iPhoto.  I tried ignoring iPhoto and finding a way to move them over myself, but I don’t see my camera without iPhoto.  So, I let iPhoto do it’s thing and everything was wonderful.

Except……  I can’t see my files!!!  iPhoto moves them to it’s library (which happens to be hidden).  I’ve picked around and discovered that I can find those hidden photos, but read an article warning me NOT to move them because I could corrupt iPhoto’s database.  Of course, I’ve read a few articles about how I can work around this particular problem (hidden photos), but there’s so many steps involved it makes moving photos from the camera to my Mac an opera.  I could let iPhoto do its thing and then copy the files to my structure but then I would have two copies of every file.  It just shouldn’t be that way. Ugh!

So, (catching breathe and breathing slow) I’ve decided.  I’m going to let iPhoto have control over the storage of my photos (trying not to hyperventilate).  I’ve figured out how to burn CD/DVD’s of my photos, back them up, open and edit photos in Photoshop Elements and even downloaded a little add on program so that I can upload my photos from iPhoto to Shutterfly with ease.

Unless any of you Mac users have any other suggestions?

Manda