Help, I'm in trouble

Question

Being a newcomer to iPhoto and not understanding all its finer points, I have made a terrible mess of my collection of photos. I had about 1000 photos taken and organised into folders etc and everything was fine. I was able to do slide shows etc, but I thought I would be smart and tidy up the the iPhoto Library ( Oh Dear ).
I went through the folders and took all the photos out of their rolls etc and put them into 1 new folder. I did not understand that they needed the Data folder with them to make them work as a slide show etc.
Now I have all the photos in one neat pile and all the Data folders in their original places and things just don't work. Because there were something like 50 or so destinations etc I don't know which photos belong with which data !!!
I'm a silver surfer of 65 years plus and my wife is furious because I try to improve on things that I really don't know all that much about.
In short, is there any way I can get things back to where they were without trying to mix and match all the data and photos ? An impossible task I think.
Any suggestions would please my wife.
Bob.
PS I'm using iPhoto 6.
emac   Mac OS X (10.3.9)   iPhoto 6

Answer 1

Hi outrigger,
I don't even know where to begin. Hmmmmm, I'll start here:
Two Apple kbs for you to read
Don't tamper with files in the iPhoto library folder
About the iPhoto Library folder
Next I will show/explain the folder structure of the library in the Finder so maybe you can sort of get some order.
iPhoto 6 Library folder in the Finder
As you can see the structure is now related to rolls. Rolls are created for each folder you import and each import session from a camera.
It is very easy to change the names of film rolls within iPhoto to make them easier to find images within. Open the info panel in iPhoto by clicking on the "i" icon. Once it is opened, click on the roll title in the viewing window.
Click on the word "title" in the info pane and type in your new title. I like to use a date and text format such as 12/25/05 Christmas at Mom's, 1/05/06 my birthday, etc. Once the roll names are changed within iPhoto, they are also changed within the Finder, making it easy to locate an image.
When importing from a camera, make sure you name the roll with a date and text before the import.
Now this is where there might be a problem. As you can see in the screenshot there are three main folders: Data, Originals, and Modified If you had a photo named 102.jpg, there would be a thumbnail in the Data folder named 102.jpg, a photo in the Originals folder named 102.jpg, and if you edited that photo, an image named 102.jpg in the Modified folder.
Since those photos with the same name were in different folders they were fine. But if you take them out of those folders and plop them into the same folder, they would overwrite each other so there would only be one photo with that name in the folder. Did you get any messages asking if it was ok to replace the image with another when you did this?
Navigate through your photos and tell me the sizes. The photos from the Data folder are around 25-40 kb in size.
The photos from your Originals and Modified folders would be much larger depending on your camera megapixel.
If you can, go through the photos and tell me their size.