Importing into iPhoto from large external storage

Question

I am sure this has been answered before but I confess I cannot find an answer that allows me to do what I would like, so I apologize if this is redundant and in which case a pointer to the right place would be appreciated. Here is my problem, I have been taking digital photos since the start of digital photography, I have around 40,000 nicely filed and categorized. I have a master Photo directory which contains a bunch of generic subject matters, family, kids, etc. Then there are folders named simply by year, one set for business, one for family, and a few more for special circumstances. These each contain folders with subject matter with each subject matter folder name preceded by a 6-character date (yymmdd), so I'll have "090812 Trip to Estonia", and then maybe "100828 Bertie's Birthday Party" and so on. Thus everything sorts nicely on a calendar-time basis and I can find stuff easily and quickly. I have been doing this for decades. I use Photo Mechanic as a file manager because I have found nothing faster or more complete - JUST for photo management, which is exactly what I want, and I use Photoshop for fiddling and messing around.
But - I would LOVE to use some of the iPhoto features.
So - How can I get iPhoto to manage some of my photos. Not all of them, that would be excessive, but say the last 10 years of family pictures and maybe some selected other folders.
I really do not want to duplicate everything in two places, can iPhoto use links to the originals and then manage the links in its own manner? I do not want to change my current organization structure, for one thing it is duplicated automatically on two computers and a NAS, then backed up automatically from the computers - all Macs. Also there are two PC users that access and jointly administer the NAS. The Macs then sync-up automatically. So the structure is really not something I can change. But I could do something locally to the Macs to use iPhoto that does not impact the main storage structure.
Does anyone have any ideas how I might accomplish this? Can iPhoto manage photo collections in the tens of thousands? Any suggestions?
Thanks - Lawrence

Answer 1

I have a similar naming convention where the file name is preceded by the YYYYMMDD and the files are located in an event folder (i.e., 2nd birthday, pumpkin picking). Each event is then located in a folder by year. I currently use Canon's software to do this on a PC. (EOS Rebel XTi)
You can not control the folder structure of iPhoto and should never be going into the iPhoto library so it makes no difference. iPhoto uses the file name of the file when you import so you can control the file names by (and only by) naming the files the way you want and then importing
For clarification, is this possible using iPhoto?
As to file names -as to folder names and structure no
Can I direct iPhoto to do this whenever downloading new pics without using the Canon software and store these files within iPhoto?
no
Or is there a way to direct pics into "the iPhone library" using the Canon software?
No - search the forums - there is a recent topic on scanning to a folder and using Automator to watch the folder and import photos place in it into iPhoto - that would work for what you wnat I believe
LN