External harddrive to store my photos on? And other questions...

[Gherkin]

Well I have the digital Canon Rebel XT. The files that come off this thing are quite large and are quickly filling up my 80 GB HD on my PowerBook.

What are my options as far as external harddrives? Should I get a firewire or USB 2? Any suggestions on size? Can I plug my XT into my PowerBook, and then have iPhoto import the photos onto the external HD? Is there some other program besides iPhoto I should be using to import my images (it seems kinda slow)?

Also, why does Finder say the photos are ~3 MB each, but when I open one in Photoshop, it says on the bottom status bar thing that they are ~27 MB each?

I know there are a lot of questions there, just answer what you can.

 

[munkle]

I'll give it a pop!

1) A lot of HD's have both FireWire and USB 2.0. I recommend something like this.

2) Size: basically the bigger the better. But 250 GB seems to be good point between size and cost.

3) You can indeed store your iPhoto library on an external HD. This will help you out. Also check out iPhoto Buddy, which will let you create multiple iPhoto libraries.

4) There are iPhoto alternatives available, the main contender being iView. If you just want to import, maybe give Image Capture a go (located in your applications folder).

5) I have no idea why there is such a huge discrepancy in file sizes between the Finder and Photoshop. What's the actual file size when you save from Photoshop?

If I had to guess I would say that Photoshop is giving you an estimate and is adding it's own data to the file size. I wouldn't worry about it too much