Sam Asks:

I’ve been getting used to iPhoto as I’m used to just browsing for pictures in Windows Explorer. Anyway, I let iPhoto copy my images to the iPhoto library. But unlike the iTunes library function which very logically puts music in Artist – Album folders. But the iPhoto library seems to hide my photos so I can’t access them through Finder. I’m just curious what the “Mac” way would be to for example, open a photo to edit in photoshop.

There’s two ways of approaching this problem, one of which is if you just want to edit photos using an external photo editor. The other way is to access the actual photo files in the Finder. The explanations for each are below.

To Access via External Editor

If all you want to do is just be able to edit your photos using Photoshop, you can simply change the iPhoto preferences. You just need to open up your Preferences, click the selection that says “Edit Photo” and then choose the application that you want to edit your photos with. Then, when you click the edit button in iPhoto, your pictures will open up in the external editor.

To access the File Hierarchy

On the other hand, if you want to access your photos in a folder hiearchy, simillar to the iTunes folder system, you just have to do some right-click action. First, you should navigate to the Photos Folder, then right click on the iPhoto Library file, and choose “Show Package Contents”.