Where and how does iPhoto keep photos?

I am in the process of scanning and editing about 1000 old Kodakchrome slides taken over the past 40+ years.
My scans go into Photoshop Elements for tarting up and then are stored in various folders with appropriate names. After that I import them into iPhoto 5 in order to assemble them into albums, slides shows or whatever.
Questions: 1. Does iPhoto actually import and keep a copy of each image file? 2. Can I safely delete the folders I have used for the original and processed scans? 3. If I back-up the iPhotolibraries to an external hard drive, I am safe - I won't lose my pictures?
I am sure that these basic questions have been answered by various Mac gurus a zillion times before but I found it pretty daunting to read through the 20+ pages shown in discussions. One has to admit the contents of the iPhoto folders and files is all pretty mysterious!
Any help or direction will be most gratefully received.
David Amies

Hi David,
A little more info for you...
--First thing to know and remember is this...Do not drag any images, folder of images into the iPhoto Library in the Finder. Images have to be imported into iPhoto within the application. Do not scan images and save them into the iPhoto Library folder in the Finder. Save them to another location such as the Pictures folder or even the desktop. You can then import them into iPhoto.
--You have a folder of images on your hard drive and want to import them into iPhoto. Drag the folder of images into an open iPhoto Library window and the folder of photos will be copied into the library, resulting in a new roll with the name of the folder. You now have two copies of those photos, the ones in iPhoto's database and the ones on your desktop. You can keep the ones on your desktop that you just imported as backup or you can delete that folder.
-- you scan a picture/pictures and save it in a folder. You cannot scan directly into iPhoto or the iPhoto Library folder in the Finder.
You want all your photos in iPhoto so you import them into iPhoto.
Now you have two copies of that picture/pictures, so you can delete the originals that were in the scanned folder and keep the one/ones that were imported into iPhoto.
-- You download pictures from your camera into iPhoto.
There is now one copy of each of the pictures.
You want to change something about a picture you imported, such as
cropping it or changing the size, or changing the orientation.
Once you do that to a picture, you now have two copies of the picture
in iPhoto, the original and the edited one. The edited one will be in the library organize view. The original is packed away in an Original folder in your iPhoto Library folder under the date of the roll. You can always revert to the original by control clicking on the photo and choose "revert to orginal" You will not have this choice if you used iPhoto Diet to get rid of the Originals.
(a quick note on cropping within iPhoto...when you are in edit mode, you automatically will be in the crop mode with cross hairs to highlight the crop area. To finish cropping you must click the crop button and then go back to library view and your cropped picture will be there.
3.You want to use Photoshop or another graphic program to edit a picture in your iPhoto library.
You can open up prefs for iPhoto and choose "when double clicking on
photo ..do" choose "other" and select Photoshop. Now you can edit all
pictures in your iPhoto library in PhotoShop by double clicking. If you save the photo with the same name and as a flattened file it will be saved right into iPhoto and you will see the changes. If you don't want to save it into iPhoto then do a "save as" and save to the desktop. You will then have the original photo still in iPhoto and your new edited photo on the desktop.
Or, with iPhoto open, you can drag a picture from the library window
to your desktop (you see a + sign on the pic you are dragging). You now
have two of the same picture, one in the iPhoto library and one on your desktop. You can open up the one on your desktop in any graphic program and work on it. The one in iPhoto stays the same. You can also share/export the picture/pictures to your desktop or folder to work on them or do batch processing, etc. You will still have the originals in your iPhoto Library.
Or, you can open up the ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/folders and option drag any
picture out of the folder to your desktop. Notice that you will see a plus sign while dragging the photo. This is copying the file to your desktop
I would advise anyone not to do this as they might forget to use the option key and drag the photo out. Next time you open iPhoto the photo will be missing.
Two Apple kbs for you to read
Don't tamper with files in the iPhoto library folder

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Where and how does iPhoto store photos?

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I can be confident that they'll be backed up with Time Machine,
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and they will remain in their original format (unless I edit within iPhoto),
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Where and how does iPhoto keep photos?

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