How to access iPhoto libraries from finder

Try this approach:

When your mom is creating a message, have her click the "Show Photo Browser" button shown here:

Then she can choose the photo she wants to include from iPhoto and drag it in to the email message body.

You and your Mom are probably using 2 different version of iPhoto. On the newer version that is included with newer Mac computers Apple has made it almost impossible to access your pictures from any other App than iPhoto, including Finder.

I suggest she stop using iPhoto and switch to some other image management and editing program. There are several available. Some free and some not.

Think about it this way: There is some big application out there (iPhoto in this case) that keeps an extensive library (photos as well as metadata). That library contains indexing information, edit information, other (e.g., EXIF) information. That library was never intended to be directly manipulated by an end user. It is a proprietary data structure, built for internal use by the application.

Similarly, should you be able to externally view the contents of Pages, Numbers, Microsoft Word, or Microsoft Excel files in a standard viewer, Finder, or Internet Explorer (on a Windows machine)? Not necessarily.

I have no idea why they do it. To get to the original images you go to your home folder, IE your Username folder, then the Pictures subfolder then find the iPhoto Library.photolibrary package. Right or Control Left click on it and select "Show Package Contents" and a whole other set of subfolder will be revealed. In that list there is one called "Masters" and then subfolders under that usually by date. Those are your original images. BUT those are the originals and does not contain any edits you might have done to them. Also that is not what iPhoto displays in the program. That is a complete different system which will show the edits you have done. Where that is and how to access those images I don't know unless you use iPhoto. In iPhoto you can Export those images that have or don't have edits and place them in another folder someplace on your drive to have access to them.

For these reasons, and that I have Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, I will never use iPhoto again (other than to import a few images to be able to help others with iPhoto)

If you move those original images it will screw up iPhoto, or so I am lead to believe.

gritzildino wrote:

"Apple has made it almost impossible to access your pictures from any other App than iPhoto, including Finder."

That seems really strange to me... Why would they do that?