CREAMASTER wrote:… Also, do we just not do manual anymore? Where's there an instruction manual for photos?
I googled Mac Photos Instruction Manual and got this:
Photos User Guide for Mac - Apple Support
It's got a bit too much fluff, but it's searchable.
There are two ways to use Photos-- as a Managed Library (good) and as a Referenced Library (bad.) You seem to be talking about a Referenced Library, one in which the image files are stored by a File Manager like Finder, and Photos uses pointers to refer to those pictures-- you see them and edit them in Photos, but the files themselves are not really controlled by Photos. There are some Image Mangers that do this pretty well, but Photos is very bad at it. If a picture file is manipulated with Finder, for instance, outside of Photos, then Photos loses track of it and it may be very difficult to re-establish the connection. We've seen very few people who have tried this and were happy with it, and we've seen many more who found it unmanageable. We always recommend against trying a Referenced Library.
The default setting is for a Managed Library. In this form, Photos imports all the pictures to its own Photos Library, usually stored in the Pictures folder. The Library is a special folder called a package, that discourages messing around inside in order to keep the pictures safe. I typically move pictures from my Nikon to folders in Finder, and I then import those to Photos. The Finder folders are now redundant, but a better word is backup-- two independent copies of the pictures. My Finder Folders of pictures get moved to an external hard drive to be safe.
In the same way that Finder is a File Management system, Photos is an Image Manager. Its power is to allow you to organize your pictures in whatever way you like, and edit and add comments while still keeping track. Here's the thing: Photos is a non-destructive editor, which means that the imported pictures are also safe-- the are never modified, though they are given unique file names. Edits that you make on pictures in Photos don't change the original picture-- Photos records the editing steps and recreates the edited image on the fly.
So, to answer your original question, for Photos, the Original Image is inside the Photos Library Package where it is protected from being changed to no long be an Original. Photos does not consider the unprotected file in Finder to be the original, since it can be altered.
