> Well except it's easy to know where they're stored.
Sure, I can control-click the folder, select "Show Package Contents" (?!? an obvious way to say "open this folder"), open the directory named "Originals" and then drill down into the year-stamped folders until I find my albums. But clearly Apple doesn't want me doing that. Otherwise, the photo library would work like all the normal folders. I could simply double click to open it and view its contents.
This is all I meant by "Apple goes out of its way to make this harder."
Why are you using iPhoto again? It’s not for you. I see no reason whatsoever why I would ever want to touch my photos in the filesystem (and there is nothing wrong with that) but you seem to need that functionality (and there is nothing wrong with that).
Apple has always provided an alternative way of importing photos in Mac OS X (it is, in fact, the way of importing photos that predates iPhoto), the application is called “Image Capture”, it’s in your applications folder and you can make it you default for whenever you are connecting a camera. It puts photos in folders.
So, "drag and drop" out of iPhoto isn't what you want, and you don't want to just use the "open file" dialog from another OSX app (since that lets you access all parts of the iPhoto library), and then you don't like how you have to click down a few folders once you do use "show package contents"?
The only person going out of their way to make this difficult is you.
FFS, Apple is far from perfect, but the things you're complaining about have pretty simple answers.
Let's imagine I use a Mac. I open Gmail and I want to send my father a cute picture of his niece. There's no direct way to do this without leaving the application I'm in (Safari) and going somewhere else to get at the picture.
By contrast, if this were a Pages document, I could simply click on "Attach a file" and then browse to the folder where the document lives. In the case of iPhoto and iTunes, this feature - file browsing - is simply not as straightfoward. I don't think that's up for debate. You are free to suggest ways that I can get at the photo (through iPhoto, through another OSX app), but I can't browse to the item the way that I can browse to other files on my filesystem.
> The only person going out of their way to make this difficult is you.
I really don't see how. I want something perfectly normal: I want "Attach a file" to work. In many cases, with many Apple programs, it does. But in a number of other cases (iPhoto, iTunes), it does not. This is not my fault. I am not doing anything special or nerdy or geeky here.
Ah, but you can access anything in iPhoto in the "open file" dialog that opens up when you go to attach a file in gmail. It's in the left sidebar under "media", from there you can get to anything in iPhoto organized in the same way they are in iPhoto (here is a screenshot: http://civicit.com/~tvon/files/osx-open-file.png).
Obviously though, you didn't find this, and I can see how that could be a bit obtuse if you expect to browse "Pictures" and find a bunch of image files.
> Let's imagine I use a Mac. I open Gmail and I want to send my father a cute picture of his niece. There's no direct way to do this without leaving the application I'm in (Safari) and going somewhere else to get at the picture.
I hope you are not serious, because it's not only trivial, I explained how it works in the comment you first replied to:
> * If you want to open one of your pictures in a third-party software, OSX's standard file picker has a "media" section which gives you a special iPhoto file picker (which works extremely well, it can even search through all your tags and faces)
OSX's standard image picker has a direct access to iPhoto libraries, and gives you direct access to iPhoto's search engine as well. Likewise for iTunes.
> I really don't see how. I want something perfectly normal: I want "Attach a file" to work. In many cases, with many Apple programs, it does. But in a number of other cases (iPhoto, iTunes), it does not. This is not my fault. I am not doing anything special or nerdy or geeky here.
Out of 6 phrases in this comment, only 2 are correct. And one of them only barely.
I was serious, and I was wrong. Thanks and thanks to tvon for explaining how this works. I didn't read your initial comment that far down since I thought I knew how it worked. I was busy being annoyed at Apple and in a rush to write my response.
Sure, I can control-click the folder, select "Show Package Contents" (?!? an obvious way to say "open this folder"), open the directory named "Originals" and then drill down into the year-stamped folders until I find my albums. But clearly Apple doesn't want me doing that. Otherwise, the photo library would work like all the normal folders. I could simply double click to open it and view its contents.
This is all I meant by "Apple goes out of its way to make this harder."