Getting photos OUT of iPhoto

Hi all,

I used to use iPhoto 4 a long time ago, and then stopped using it as my photos took up so much more space in iPhoto than kept outside of the software library in folders. I had a really small hard drive and no external drive at the time. Then at some point I tried using iPhoto 6... and to make a long story short I now have an incredible mess of photos, some of which exist both in an iPhoto library (either 4 or 6 or both) and in folders elsewhere, some of which are only in folders outside of iPhoto, and some of which are only in an iPhoto library. I now have a much larger hard drive and external drives, and am trying to set order to the mess (it will probably take me the rest of the year!)

To complicate matters even more, I just now accidentally updated one of my myriad versions of iPhoto Library to iPhoto 7.1.4 (the version I have currently installed), and have noticed that you can no longer see the originals folder inside the iPhoto library in the Finder, UNLESS you right-click on a photo in iPhoto and select "Show File", and then you can browse through the folders of the iPhoto Library. I suppose they made this change so you wouldn't mess with those folders and files.

Looking at the folders inside the iPhoto library that I accessed in that way for the library I accidentally upgraded, I see they are a mess...some dates have two folders, other folders say "Roll X" instead of being separated by date, etc.

*I want to extract all the photos that are in the iPhoto Library to folders outside of the program*--just the original photos--so I can

A. Have a backup of the pictures outside of any iPhoto Library, and
B. Reimport all my pictures once I make heads and tails of what is where (or perhaps just have iPhoto reference the originals in folders outside of the iPhoto Library, since I read that is now possible).

My question is this:

What is the best way of getting the pictures out of the iPhoto Library? If I get access to the original folders within the library by right-clicking any photo and then being able to browse inside the library, am I going to have any problems if I copy or move those original pictures directly to a folder outside of the iPhoto Library? Would it be better to export the pictures? Does exporting using "current" under "Kind" give you the original more safely?

Also, any suggestions on how to best have photos OUTSIDE of an iPhoto library organized so that iPhoto can reference them, but your backup is also organized? I'd like to have my photos organized by date in the backup as well, so that I don't have to backup all my pictures every time I add new ones, just add the latest to the backup drive.

Finally, any suggestions on what to do with pictures that you scan so that they appear by the date they were taken as opposed to the date they were scanned? Is there a way to modify the date of the photo info?

Thanks in advance for any insights!