Masters vs Preview -- and older iPhoto Versions.

I'm trying to get a handle on my Photos. Seems like every time I get comfortable with how to manage photos in iPhoto, a newer version comes around and changes the game rules. I have new (Macbook Air) and Older (MacBook 2009) machines running different OS version.

MASTERS:

I believe this Folder is a replacement for what older versions of iPhoto called "Originals".

If I drag all of these to an external USB disk (copy, not move):

1. Will that USB disk contain all of my photos?
2. Will that USB disk contain ONLY one copy of each photo (e.g. no thumbs, no modified version, etc)?
3. If I later drag the files from the USB disk into a different or new iPhoto (even a different version of iPhoto on a machine running an older OS), will the photos still contain the original data (date/time/location) as originally included by the camera or phone?

PREVIEW:

I've heard different explanations, so I don't know what to believe. In other version of iPhoto, there were Originals and Modified. Those words seemed a bit more staight-forward to me. Original was what came from camera or import. Modified is what you did to some of the pictures (like red-eye removal). So I'm assuming that the "Preview" folder simply replaces the older "Modified" folder (because there are M is symlinked to P). (BTW, "Preview" sounds like a place that Thumbnails might exist, but from what I can tell it's just an unfortunate choice names). I believe I don't need to copy the Preview folder, because this contains modified copies of some of the masters. I'd end up with duplicates and confusion.

So assuming I can simply drag my MASTERS to an external USB disk, and then later import some of these into other iPhoto libraries, then I should have a fairly straight forward way of splitting them into smaller groups which I can selectively import into ANY version of iPhoto.

I understand that there are also many 3rd party tools (fat cat, etc) to help. Sometimes managing multple version of multiple tools and licenses on multiple machines becomes harder becomes quite overwhelming. And of couse, the tool would have to be compatible with all past, present, and future versions of iPhoto. I prefer to either work within iPhoto when I can, and then work directly with files (finder or shell) for the rest.

I'm trying to manage 60 GB of photos (some movies). There are about 300 movies, mostly small, but a few are huge.

As for as I can tell, there's no way to have iPhoto do any of the following:

• Can't sort photos and movies by SIZE
• Can't display the KEYWORDs under each Photo while viewing a page full of thumbs.

  Sorry, the Info button in iPhoto 11 which shows info for ONE photo at a time in the sidebad is not a solution.

• Can't get iPhoto re-organize the Masters folder, by putting my photos into the same hierarchy as my Events (that would certainly make it easier to copy portions of a library to another library or computer).