Long answer so bear with me:
Best advice: Impoort 200 hundred photos into iPhoto and explore. It's much more powerful than a suite of folders in the File Browser, much more flexible in what it can do. It has many ways to organise and categorise your Photos and amny ways to find and share them. It's not like a bunch of files in the Finder.
Anyway:
That's a Folder Tree you got there. So just start at the bottom of the tree and drag a folder of images to Album heading on the iPhoto Window. iPhoto will import the photos and make an Album of them. You can then create the enclosing folder in iPhoto (File -> New Folder) and drag the Album to it.
So you end up with
Folder 2010 containing Album: Xmas 2010 etc
Some comments:
The structure you outline here is one for Files and not Photos. Using that structure in iPhoto is a bit pointless as it remains as limited in iPhoto as it is in the Finder.
iPhoto offers much more varied organisational opportunities, leveraging data that the file browser doesn't even know about - such as Exif and IPTC.
For Instance: anything date-based is done automatically based on the date and time of the Exif metadata in the Photos. So, Events are made this way, automatically. You can search by date using Smart Albums or the Calendar search in the search box: Therefore can easily find all the photos from any specific day, month, year, or in any time range using one of these tools.
So, you could instead have a Folder called 'XMas' and have all the Xmas Albums in it.
Or both. Because iPhoto Albums reference the photos in the Library, they use no extra disk space. An Image can be in 50 Albums with no space wasted.
Here's a stock answer that I use to illustrate the organisational opportunitie of iPhoto:
I use Events simply as big buckets of Photos: Spring 08, July - Nov 06 are typical Events in my Library. I use keywords and Smart Albums extensively. I title the pics broadly.
I keyword on a
Who
What
Where basis (The When is in the photos's Exif metadata). I also rate the pics on a 1 - 5 star basis.
Using this system I can find pretty much find any pic in my 40k library in a couple of seconds.
So, for example, I have a batch of pics titled 'Seattle 08' and a typical keywording might include: John, Anne, Landscape, mountain, trees, snow. With a rating included it's so very easy to find the best pics we took at Mount Rainier.
File -> New Smart Album
set it to 'All"
title contains Seattle
keyword is mountain
keyword is snow
rating is 5 stars
Or, want a chronological album of John from birth to today?
New Smart Album
Keyword is John
Set the View options to Sort By Date Ascending
Want only the best pics?
add Rating is greater than 4 stars
The best thing about this system is that it's dynamic. If I add 50 more pics of John to the Library tomorrow, as I keyword and rate them they are added to the Smart Album.
In the end, organisation is about finding the pics. The point is to make locating that pic or batch of pics findable fast. This system works for me.
One thing that caught my eye:
I've moved them all over to the 'Finder' view, which is fine, but ideally I'd like them in iPhoto too...
By default, iPhoto copies all the photos into the Library when you import them. That means that your Folder Tree is redundant. In time, you'll want to delete it - but don't do that straight away. Wait until your familiar with iPhoto and comfortable with it. It's an excellent app, but not for everybody.
If you use iPhoto it replaces the Finder or file browser for anything to do with your photos - it's the go-to app for that. And I do mean anything:
Want to edit with another editor:
You can set Photoshop (or any image editor) as an external editor in iPhoto. (Preferences -> General -> Edit Photo: Choose from the Drop Down Menu.) This way, when you double click a pic to edit in iPhoto it will open automatically in Photoshop or your Image Editor, and when you save it it's sent back to iPhoto automatically. This is the only way that edits made in another application will be displayed in iPhoto.
Want to email, upload, use a photo in another app:
There are many, many ways to access your files in iPhoto: You can use any Open / Attach / Browse dialogue. On the left there's a Media heading, your pics can be accessed there. Command-Click for selecting multiple pics.
(Note the above illustration is not a Finder Window. It's the dialogue you get when you go File -> Open)
You can access the Library from the New Message Window in Mail:
There's a similar option in Outlook and many, many other apps. If you use Apple's Mail, Entourage, AOL or Eudora you can email from within iPhoto.
If you use a Cocoa-based Browser such as Safari, you can drag the pics from the iPhoto Window to the Attach window in the browser.
If you want to access the files with iPhoto not running:
For users of 10.6 and later: You can download a free Services component from MacOSXAutomation which will give you access to the iPhoto Library from your Services Menu.
Using the Services Preference Pane you can even create a keyboard shortcut for it.
For Users of 10.4 and 10.5 Create a Media Browser using Automator (takes about 10 seconds) or use this free utility Karelia iMedia Browser
Other options include:
Drag and Drop: Drag a photo from the iPhoto Window to the desktop, there iPhoto will make a full-sized copy of the pic.
File -> Export: Select the files in the iPhoto Window and go File -> Export. The dialogue will give you various options, including altering the format, naming the files and changing the size. Again, producing a copy.
Show File: a. On iPhoto 09 and earlier: Right- (or Control-) Click on a pic and in the resulting dialogue choose 'Show File'. A Finder window will pop open with the file already selected. 3.b.
b: On iPhoto 11 and later: Select one of the affected photos in the iPhoto Window and go File -> Reveal in Finder -> Original. A Finder window will pop open with the file already selected.
