Photos display much too small!

[Skylark]

I have a Canon Powershot A610 digital camera, and recently I switched laptops to a Macbook Pro. It downloads photos automatically to the iPhoto folder, which I dislike but don't know how to change.

iPhoto only lets me view my photos in a slideshow, which is totally inconvenient when I need to move files around and edit things, but for some unknown reason, when I open the photos in any other program, they only display in thumbnail size. Yet they're fine in iPhoto!

I need high-resolution photos for my university projects, and the only way I can get them on this laptop is to open my photos in iPhoto, start a "classic" slideshow (which is still too small, really), take a screenshot of the slideshow, then open the screenshot in another program. This is truly bizzare.

Why are my photos displaying in high quality in iPhoto, but stuck at thumbnail size in Premier, Photoshop and every other program I open them in? It's almost completely unworkable, and I know the problem isn't with my camera, as it worked fine on my old laptop.

 

[skybolt]

You are certainly going to a LOT of extra work here! What, exactly are you trying to do with your photos?

In iPhoto, the photos are displayed in Events, generally sorted by date (look in the View menubar and you can set it how you like it). You can rename your photos in the event, add keywords so that you can find your photos easier. You can make albums, smart albums and folders to put those albums in for clearer organization. You can edit them from within the app itself, or you can set something else to be your external editor (look in preferences for this), like Photoshop, Elements, etc. Setting the external editor will have the advantage of having your photos put right back where they belong once you are finished editing.

If you need to use a photo somewhere else, you can use the export function and export it to your desktop and go from there. You will always be using the highest quality, unless you tell it to send a smaller resolution.

You NEVER need to go into the library in finder -- the app organizes things for you so that you can find what you want almost instantly. And does it in the background and gives you a beautiful method of viewing them.

So, tell us exactly what your workflow is like, and we can help! And, check out some of the tutorials here: http://www.apple.com/support/iphoto/

 

[sgould]

For 99% of my needs with photos, iPhoto is fine.

When I need to do some more complex stuff, I just drag the photo from the iPhoto front page to the desktop. Then I can open the copy that's put there.

If I just double click, it opens in Preview. Preview (at least in the later OS versions) will allow you to crop and resize photos and save as pdf etc.

You can also right click the desktop copy and open in any other suitable application.

 

[Curiosity]

I dislike the way iPhoto stores image files, so after iPhoto has loaded the pictures from my camera, I enhance them if they need it with iPhoto, then drag them out of iPhoto one by one and drop them into a normal directory, where I can rename them and use other applications to crop them and put captions on them. After that, I delete the entire contents of the iPhoto Library in my Pictures directory. I leave the images in a normal directory so that I can view them with viewers that I actually like.