[mo4yajunk]

I must admit that right now I don't understand the structure of Iphoto and reading apple's tech support is just not clear.

A) Am I supposed to move all my photos from the hard drive into the picture folders so that I dont' have duplicate photos on my hard drive &

b) when I add new photos to a folder, can Iphoto automatically add the photo to the library or must I always drag and drop a new photo each and every time I get one?

[Skybolt]

I'm assuming that you have your photos in your "Pictures" folder, but not in iPhoto yet. Is that correct? If so, open iPhoto, set your preferences to "add photos to iPhoto library, and then use the "Import" function to get them into the iPhoto Library (this is not the "Pictures" folder, but a library within it). For the safety of your photos, I highly recommend you back them up before doing anything. This will put your photos in the correct place for iPhoto to find them. One caveat, if you have your photos organized in some fashion, you will want to import folder by folder, or your organization will be lost. Once you are confident that iPhoto finds your photos, you can delete the original file from your "Pictures" folder. From then on, because you have set your preferences to "add to the library", any time you add photos to iPhoto (you cannot drag and drop, you must import either from your camera or a file, etc.) they will be in the right place.

If that does not address your question/situation, please post back with more information.

[mo4yajunk]

No, unfortunately that did not do what I wanted. I may not have explained myself correctly. I was hoping that Iphoto was capable enough that if I put some new pictures in a folder that was already listed as an event in iphoto, that when I re-import that folder, iphoto would not create a new event but put the new pictures in the same event since the pictures are in the same folder that I originally imported. Did I explain that right. It makes sense to me but I may not have still explained this correctly. That's why I'm a newbie :D

[dcpics]

Ok, I think I know what you are wanting to do and I think the best way is a pretty simple two-step process.

You don't necessarily want to keep importing the same folder. When you import new images they will come into the Library and show up in the "Latest Import" folder as well as show up as a new Event under the Events tab.

You can drag them from the "latest import" tab into one of your Albums or go to Events and select that import and drag it onto the event you want, it will ask "do you want to merge these events" You say yes (and check the never ask again box if you want to do this regularly) and then all those newly imported images will be added to the existing event.