Can someone tell me the proper way to back up my iPhoto library

Question

I want to back up my iPhoto library on an external hard drive. Do I have to go into Pictures and then iPhoto library to copy it over the external hard drive? Can I not just drag photos and albums directly from iPhoto? My concern is that when I go into albums via Pictures folder and then iPhoto library, you don't see all your photos in the albums. I never understood this.
Please help...

Answer 1

Lori,
If you go to ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library, the iPhoto Library is the iPhoto Library folder am am telling you to backup. This Library/folder contains all your images and the data files that iPhoto writes that stores all the album, slideshows, books, etc. info. To keep all this intact, you have to backup/copy the entire iPhoto Library folder.
Previous versions of iPhoto had an Albums folder with aliases to the images in the albums. This Album folder was in the iPhoto Library folder in the Finder. iPhoto 5 does not use this Album folder and therefor it is no longer updated. You will find that there are just iPhoto 4 created albums in it.
iPhoto 5 now stores the Album information in a data xml file. The Albums folder within the iPhoto Library folder is no longer used. At some point, usually after a rebuild, you will no longer have that folder in the Finder.
If you need to access photos from an album it is very difficult for a third party application to navigate the iPhoto Library in order to find the photo you need. You will have to know the date of import in order to find the photo.
There are some third party applications that can read the xml file and can navigate the iPhoto library and show you the Albums. Hopefully more applications will be revised to read this file.
Until then you will have to Share/Export the photos to the desktop. You can then navigate to the desktop to use the photos (example: web uploading from online photo site)
If your application supports drag and drop, you can drag the photo from an open iPhoto Library window into your application.
For email you can also use the email icon within iPhoto to open a message with the highlighted photo attached.
You can also use spotlight to find images in an Album...
This is what I have done using Spotlight to find my images that are in iPhoto albums without opening iPhoto..
In iPhoto, select the album, then select all, go to Photos/batch change.
Change the comments to text. In the text field I put the name of the Album.
Do this for each album.
Close iPhoto.
Open Spotlight and put in the name of the Album ( you have to remember the names of the albums or have then written down)
In the spotlight search results. click on "show all"
Under "Images" click on the "xx more" to show all the images in the album.
Make sure you have it in icon view, the icon view box is the last one on the blue images line.
Now you can control click on the image to "reveal in finder", open in iPhoto or Mail, etc.
I am not sure if this is going to make you happy and it is a little more work, but you can find images in albums and even view them in a slideshow (by clicking the play arrow at the end of the Images highlighted blue line) using Spotlight, all without opening iPhoto.
One important thing to know is you can set up a graphic program to be an external editor (when you double click an image in the library} such as PhotoShop or PS Elements. You set up that within iPhoto Preferences. Just make sure you save the image flattened and with the same name. The edits will then be relected in iPhoto when you hit "save".
Two Apple kbs for you to read
Don't tamper with files in the iPhoto library folder
About the iPhoto Library folder
Lori