iPhoto is a part of the iLife Bundle from Apple. Initially, I don’t really like it because it tried to organize everything by year and not by Folders/Albums. Well, I started to look for an alternative which can be something like ACDSee (they don’t have a Mac version) or IrfanView. I was looking for something that simply acts as a Photo Viewer and not really a Photo Manager.

Well, I finally gave up and instead did the usual RTFM for about half an hour. I began to like it as I could twist it to my needs. Indeed, I am loving iPhoto now as it does a very good job of Photo Management and a viewer. With the Flickr Plugin – FlickrExport, I am loving it immensely. FlickrExport is not free but it is worth its price.

The organization of Photos by Year will go a long way in future, so let that be there with iPhoto. Let us twist it a bit to make it work for us. For those who are just fine by dumping your photos into yearly separation, there is no need to do anything beyond the default that comes with iPhoto. You’ll definitely be happy with it.

I know that I will have lots of Albums/Sets for myself and other people – family, friends, colleagues et al. The first thing I did without creating nested folders, was to create separate Main Folder – Brajeshwar, Nishita, Linda, etc.

After that, I did an “File > Import to Library” but taking only a single folder at a time from our previous Photo Archives. The last/final import is usually the Last Role in iPhoto. You’ve to set in your Preference to show you just “1″ Roll. Once imported into the iPhoto Database, you can then select the Last Role and Create an Album from Selection, give a name for your new Album and drop them in your separate folder. If you have already created an Album then you can simply drag it to that Album from the Last Roll.

Repeat this for all your separate folder as we want separate albums like we organized our photos into folder before in windows. Yeah! You’ll have to do that atleast as far as I know. If you are like me, well, you will have to struggle a bit with lots of photos. If you do not wish iPhoto to save the original Photos but manage just the datas, then change your Preference > Advanced and unchecked Copy files to iPhoto Library Folder. Once you finished doing your converstion to iPhoto, then you do not need to worry about the imports as you can let iPhoto do the organization when you plug in your camera or other photo device.

Well, this is how I organize my Folder and Albums/Sets using iPhoto. I’ll update this article if I find more good gotchas about iPhoto. I think I just saved myself buying another Photo Management software. Remember, once you finished everything, iPhoto will organize your Albums under years and then the Album names as folders. Enjoy!