Help with iphoto, copying and portable hard drive organizing

[sahara910]

Hello all
I don't think I have ever officially posted here.
I have been digiscrapping for a few years now and lately my poor Macbook pro just cannot work fast enough... if I open photoshop then it slows way way down.
I am thinking part of this is all my supplies are on my desktop, plus I recently (from here) learned how to create a separate iphoto library and made a digiscrap one... so now I think I have all supplies twice on my laptop...
With my pages I have been saving a pdf version in case of edits and ajpeg version (full) for printing and uploading to facebook...

I REALLY need to streamline... I am ok with major fixes here if someone has some advice of what direction to go in.
Any hard drive you recommend for a MAC (thats' portable?)
and what about iphoto...do I really have 2 files or is it a copy and didnt "duplicate"

Any help at all would be greatly appreciated. I feel so lost and none of my "IRL" friends digiscrap
Thanks!!

[readstoomuch]

I don't have an answer for you . . . but will be interested to see what others say about it all. I have never thought about what sort of files that iphoto has!

I have my digi supplies on a 2 terabyte external HD (not a portable) and have my photos on another external. They mostly off of my internal hard drive but it is still pretty full! I need another external to keep my layouts on. I keep a full jpg., the smaller jpg. that i use for posting online and the psd. file for each layout.

[maureenreynolds]

sahara910, it is a preference choice in iPhoto to decide when an item is IN and stored in iPhoto and when it is just an alias (to use the Mac term). Go to iPhoto preferences, and advanced. The first item is the choice to copy, which to me means import right into or ...leave blank and I presume it's then an alias.

ALL my photos are IN an iPhoto library. I know they aren't anywhere else on my Mac because they come from my iPhone and are deleted from the phone once imported and copied.

When I used an iPhoto library for the digi supplies, they were aliases, and the originals were stored on my hd in Cassie Jones' model folders. (Boy did that organization help!) The volume of supplies, tho, made my Mac slow down because of the amount of memory they were taking up. When I moved them to an ehd, I stopped using iPhoto for tagging etc. iPhoto also did not know where the originals were since they had been moved.

The one red flag that stood out in your post to me was that you said "I am thinking part of this is all my supplies are on my desktop". Did you actually mean DESKTOP? if so, get them off there and at least into your hd and have an alias of the folder on the desktop. I've always read that having a lot of items on the desktop slows a Mac down.

I have a 500GB LaCie ehd that is durable and portable. I am not overjoyed by the bright orange rubber frame, but it sure never gets misplaced that way. I was just in the Apple store yesterday looking at the 1T portables. There were 4 and they range there from $149-$199. You can certainly get them cheaper elsewhere but the store is a good place to see what they are guaranteeing. Just a fyi ...make sure any ehd you are thinking about is Mac formatted and ready to go. I have taken what I assumed was a good buy back to Costco for just this reason. Live and learn, and read the small print!

[vsgrandma]

Maureen,
When you say Ehd, does that mean an external hard drive? Thanks and thanks for the above comments. kAREN

[maureenreynolds]

Yes, Karen, ehd is the abbreviation for those precious external hard drives.