Original vs. Library

Question

Sorry for such a novice question here.
I have been struggling to maintain some sort of organization and methodology with my usage of iPhoto. I have been using iPhoto and iMovie (and final cut) for my business and my process has not been without problems mainly from lack of experience on how iPhoto stores it's data.
Here is a breakdown of how things work from my perspective:
If I scan photos for customers and clean them up in Photoshop prior to my editing in iMovie I end up with a folder on my desktop that contains all of the customer's photos (which I now have way too many of these folders) I then import these into iPhoto and create my folder/smartfolder for that customer so that I can import them into iMovie.
-or-
If the customer gives me all of their photos on a CD I copy the photos into a folder on the desktop and repeat the above process.
So now, in my mind, I am left with triple redundancy and have taken up unnecessary space (which I desperatly need now - I have a 500gb and 400gb internal and a 500gb external, all are down to their last 50-100gb free.)
My question is can I remove all of the folders on my desktop since they have already been imported into iPhoto or will that remove some sort of alias link that will render these photos unusable in the iLife suite (I need to keep backups of all of my projects incase previous customers need further changes or to use these same photos/video clips in a different project down the road.)
Or should I delete everything from the iPhoto library (since I have the original copies in folders and many are copied into the iMovie project as well.)
Sorry for the long post.
Any suggestions on how to better manage this beast will greatly help me reclaim some much needed space.

Answer 1

If you've selected the checkbox in iPhoto's Advanced preference section to copy the files into the library folder system when importing then you will have a copy of your files in the iPhoto Library/Originals folder and subfolders. That option is normally the default. So if you confirm that you have full sized files in the Originals folder and copy option is selected you can safely delete those from the boot drive. But do keep a backup copy on another HD or other media.
There is a way to have your "source" original files on an external HD and have an alias based library on your boot drive. I have 17,600 source files on an external HD which are 27G in size. My alias library on my boot drive is only 1.6G in size.
Apart from the obvious space saving benefits there are some caveats to the system.
1 - when the external HD with the source files is not mounted, i.e. when the laptop is on the road, only the thumbnail files will be viewable. Any edited files will be viewable in their full form as the modified file is kept in the iPhoto library on the boot drive.
2 - any function of iPhoto requiring the full sized file will not be available until the source files are available.
3 - you can add keywords (thur the Info pane in iPhoto) create new albums (but not move photos to them) and add comments.
4 - if a file is deleted from the library the source file does not get deleted. That must be done manually via the Finder.
Tutoria #2 describes how you might go about converting over to such a system.
As a professional photographer you might consider iView MediaPro as your primary asset management application. I use it as my primary application in conjunction with iPhoto on the same set of source files. iView for management, editing, etc. and iPhoto for books, calendars,etc.
Hope this has been of some help.
Do you Twango?