Photos not displaying at high resolution

Skylark

Registered
Hello, I need advice on this.

I have a Canon PowerShot A610 digital camera, and I've recently switched laptops to a Macbook Pro. This camera worked perfectly on my old laptop, and appears to work perfectly here too... on the surface.

The photos are automatically brought into iPhoto, which I'd rather not use because I need to move files around and do some editing. But OK, I can always go to the folder they're stored in and open them in another program, right? ...Wrong.

Bizarrely, my photos display well in iPhoto, but come out in a terribly small size if I open them in any other program. If I open the original files in Premier and Photoshop, for instance, I'll get a tiny little thumbnail shot about 300 pixels wide - and if I zoom in, it becomes very badly pixelated. So it really does look like the file has been downloaded at an insanely small size.

Yet when I view the slideshow in iPhoto, my pictures are displayed in a higher resolution... although they're the same files! I therefore know that the actual photos have been downloaded to the computer, not just thumbnails. To use the iPhoto versions, however, I have to start a classic slideshow (because "classic" gives the biggest pictures), take a screenshot of the slideshow, and then open the new screenshot file to get a decent-quality picture. But these are still much, much smaller than the size the photos are actually supposed to be, and it means I have to edit out the frames the slideshow put around the pictures. I have no way of accessing the files at their real size.

What's going on? How can I fix it? This is the weirdest problem I've ever had with a computer before!
 
This is really a shot in the dark without any specs besides "old laptop" and "macbook pro", but to get access to the originals in the iphoto library in newer versions of OSX you need to right-click or control click on the iphoto library and select show package contents to get to the originals.
 
In iPhoto Preferences > General tab, choose Edits photo when you double-click a photo. Then in the Edit photo drop down menu choose In application... > choose PS from the pop-up window.
In the iPhoto Library double-click a photo you want to edit and it should open with PS. You can also hit the Edit button at the bottom of the iPhoto Library after choosing a photo you want to edit.
Messing around in the iPhoto database is not recommended.
 
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