where did my imported iPhone photos go?

They exist as a giant blob of photos, uneditable and unfindable in finder (individually).

Is this what Apple Care told you? A giant blob of photos, uneditable and unfindable in finder?

The Photos Library is a sophisticated database of photos, videos, and for photos much more powerful than the Finder, as long as you are using Photos to access the photos inside. Once you let Photos handle the photos, you can search them in many ways, specific to photos and specific to the relations between photos. Photos is a photo/video manager, not a file manager. With photos you access photos in different states of edits, not files on the disk.

• You can organize and search the photos by camera tags - lens, shutter speed, aperture, flash, camera model or combinations of these attributes.
• You can organize the photos in albums and group albums by folders, according to the way you want to use them, photos for private use, photos for work, photos for projects, like books or screensavers.
• You can search photos by the capture date, the place, by the persons inthem,
• Photos is analysing your photos by the content the picture is showing, so you can search for photos by the category of a photo. For example, i wanted to find a photo of a parrot, typred "Parrot" in the search field, an photos has been showing me 28 photos that look like pictures of parrots. I did not have to enter keywords, photos is trying to understand what a photo is showing.
• Photos is supporting a lossless workflow. You can create several edited versions of a photo without needing much extra space and revert the edits individually. So you can change how a photo is cropped, without having to discard the color adjustments or the metadata yo assigned. And the adjustments will sync seemlessly across your devices with iCloud Photo Library.

There is a lot to be gained by using a digital asset management system, once we start thinking of photos and manage our digital images as photos and not as files in the Finder.

Thanks OT. 🙂

I spoke to Apple Care. It turns out that "importing" is a VERY BAD thing to do. It dumps all of your photos into a conglomerate file. They exist as a giant blob of photos, uneditable and unfindable in finder (individually). I was advised to instead go to a Mac app called "image capture" (found in Launchpad) while the phone was connected and "import" from there (select, shift select, select all, etc.) and once that is done I can choose to optionally delete them from my iPhone.

This worked :-)

Also i was told to probably use iCloud from now on as it works like Dropbox. Delete once and it gets deleted everywhere. But either way, now I can edit my images in Photoshop. This is important as I shot them on my iPhone for business use.

New to OSX/iOS, 20 years on PC (it was time to switch)

Anyway, I hope this helps others who are pulling their hair out.

Check the Steps Here > Importing photos to your computer

From Here > http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4236

click on the picture, in iPhoto, that you would like to find on your computer.

Then click on File then click Reveal in Finder and click on original file.

This should do the trick.

The photos will be in an Event. Peruse in the Event mode to see if you can find the Event.

You know the file names of the photos you imported so search by file name to see if the photos can be found in iPhoto:

Can you find them? If so you can Control (right) - click on a photo and have it show you the Event.

Thanks. Unfortunately neither of these solutions is working in Sierra :-(

Open the iPhoto Library package as shown in this screenshot and check the Masters folder to see if your image files are there:

DO NO make any changes to the content of the package. Only look for the image files.

Thanks OT. 🙂

I spoke to Apple Care. It turns out that "importing" is a VERY BAD thing to do. It dumps all of your photos into a conglomerate file. They exist as a giant blob of photos, uneditable and unfindable in finder (individually). I was advised to instead go to a Mac app called "image capture" (found in Launchpad) while the phone was connected and "import" from there (select, shift select, select all, etc.) and once that is done I can choose to optionally delete them from my iPhone.

This worked :-)

Also i was told to probably use iCloud from now on as it works like Dropbox. Delete once and it gets deleted everywhere. But either way, now I can edit my images in Photoshop. This is important as I shot them on my iPhone for business use.

New to OSX/iOS, 20 years on PC (it was time to switch)

Anyway, I hope this helps others who are pulling their hair out.

Hi DustyWhite,

Did you ever find your originals? Seems like all the ones I have been imported have been deleted. Cool.

If you tell us how you went about importing them we may be able to help.