Raw Photos and photoshop

Hi all.

i have about 1000 wedding photos i need to review and edit in Photoshop, they are currently on camera cards..

in my experience if i import them the 'normal' route into iPhoto, 1, photoshop doesn't find them and 2, if it does find them, it doesn't like opening them.

whats the best way to get them into a folder for easy access by photoshop so that i can then save them to another folder and export them back out onto a storage device for giving to a printer. in my current experience and from reading other people's queries on here, iPhoto is not great at playing nice

many thanks