I have a MacBook Pro dual-booted with Snow Leopard and Ubuntu Karmic.

I have recently imported hundreds of my photos into iPhoto - but I now want to be able to see them (and use them as desktop/screen saver images) from my Ubuntu partition (ie when the machine is running Ubuntu instead of MacOS).

Is there an easy way to do this direct from the iPhoto library or do I have to shift them all out to an external file directory or something?

Further edit - just to make it clear: I have already uploaded my photos directly into iPhoto - then spent many days categorising, tagging and uploading to flickr. Unless there's something I'm missing, I'm guessing it's likely too late to do the "don't copy into the iPhoto library" option. Happy to be proven wrong :)

Perhaps somebody knows of a way to "export" the library without losing any of the current information - so that I can (from then on) keep the photos in an external library? I don't want to do this, though, if I lose the information that is currently there.