First of all, have no fear of disturbing anything inside any current folder, unless you specifically remove something, it will still be there, even if the folders title changes.
As far as I know iPhoto and iTunes treat all your imports as 'sacred.' If you create a new folder to sort things a little, the app simply puts a pointer or alias, if you wish, to the original. This is a simplified explanation and I've never trusted either app for much and certainly have a much smaller collection in each than you do.
My point is, neither of these apps were designed for extended sorting and listing in user-defined ways. Apple decided how the lists would sort. Period. Apparently the same list coding that has been used for eons, alphabetical using ASCII character codes. That puts numbers ahead of letters, capital letters ahead of lower case and most punctuation at the end. Of course the OS further restrict a very few characters for itself. The forward slash (/) and colon (
come to mind, since they are used to display the 'path' of a file. Unless you make some changes in your prefs, adding a period to the beginning of a file/folder name will simply make it disappear. It's not destroyed, it's just hidden from noobies.
Naming images/files/folders/dogs and especially cats, is a learned skill. The Mac made it very simple for us to use just about any method we wanted without too much bother. And that was fine when we could store the whole OS on a 400 MB floppy!
Now, the OS itself, contains 10,000+ separate files, and many users would be amazed that there are several hundred those files/folders on their hard drives!
Unfortunately, most of us don't realize our current naming methods are not 'scalable' to the eventual size of our collections of similar
stuff. At that point, we realize that we should have used a different app or at least a different naming procedure. Of course, this is like closing the barn door after the water has passed under the bridge!
Another possible exercise you may want to investigate is keeping/creating more than one iPhoto Library. I understand this is now possible but have absolutely no experience. And I fear that all this would end up doing is to prevent having the same image in more than one Library, which could be another big headache. It would, obviously require more disk space as each Library has many ancillary files in it, besides just the images.
Sorry not to have an easy solution for you. I know it can be frustrating to deal with built-in limitations of an app. But, if enough people complain about them, some industrious developer will come along and create a solution, that just may be longer than you can stand (or lie, as the case may be) to wait!
I suppose you have accessed the Apple Forums concerning iPhoto? There are usually thousands of posts about every conceivable problem and often a quite expert solution for many of them.
On the bright side of this, think about what would happen if all you had were hard copies of each image?!
And how many albums would it take to store them? How many rooms would be needed? Boggles the mind!
