Your article is finished, it’s proofread, you read it aloud multiple times and save it as a draft in WordPress. Now all it needs is the perfect illustration. You have the perfect image in Mac’s iPhoto. But where the hack does a Mac store the original image file?
Where does iPhoto store your images?
Sometimes these trivia can cause your productivity to stall. This is what happened to me last weekend when working on an article.
A Google Search will provide tons of links to posts and forum discussions. But I found that most are based on old software versions and therefore obsolete.
Here’s a quick 3 step guide to locating your iPhoto image files in Finder on your Mac. This is based on the software version I currently run on – iOS 10.8.2 and iPhoto 9.4.2 – but might the same for later versions.
3 steps to locate your files
- Select the image or multiple images you want to locate in Finder right in your iPhoto app. iPhoto highlights selected images with a yellow border.
- With iPhoto as the active app click “File” in your Mac’s top menu bar.
- Select “Reveal in Finder” and then “Original File” in the drop down menu.
This will open Finder and take you directly to the image files you were looking for. The images will be pre-selected in Finder.
I like to keep the iPhoto file structure untouched. When I plan to edit an image for a article in Photoshop I work with copies of the original files that I store outside of iPhoto which is why I was looking for the originals in the first place.
Did this solve your problem and save you some time? Let me know in the comments.
