In the days of film prints, you could always stuff another shoebox with your latest photos or buy another sticky album to expand your library. Your digital camera, though, stores images as files instead, and many folks don't print their digital photographs. Instead, you can keep your entire collection of digital photographs and scanned images well ordered and easily retrieved by using iPhoto's organize mode. Then you can display them as a slide show, print them to your system printer, use them as desktop backgrounds, or burn them to an archive disc.
Using a new kind of photo album
The key to organizing images in iPhoto is the album. Each album can represent any division you like, be it a year, a vacation, your daughter, or your daughter's ex-boyfriends. Follow these steps to create a new album:
1. Either choose File --> New Album or click the plus (+) button at the bottom of the source list.
The New Album sheet appears.
2. Type the name for your new photo album.
3. Click OK.
You can drag images from the viewer into any album you choose. For example, you can move an image to another album by dragging it from the viewer to the desired album in the source list.
To remove a photo that has fallen out of favor, follow these steps:
1. In the source list, select the desired album.
2. In the viewer, select the photo that you want to remove (by clicking it).
3. Press Delete.
When you remove a photo from an album, you don't remove the photo from your collection (which is represented by the Library entry in the source list). That's because an album is just a group of links to the images in your collection. To completely remove the offending photo, click the Library entry to display your entire collection of images and delete the picture there, too.
Organizing with keywords
You can also assign descriptive keywords to images to help you organize your collection and locate certain pictures fast. iPhoto comes with a number of standard keywords, and you can create your own as well.
To illustrate, suppose that you'd like to identify your images according to special events in your family. Birthday photos should have their own keyword, and anniversaries deserve another.
iPhoto includes the following keywords:
- Favorite
- Family
- Kids
- Vacation
- Birthday
- Grayscale
- Widescreen
- Checkmark
To assign keywords to images (or remove keywords that have already been assigned), select one or more photos in the viewer. Choose Photos --> Get Info and then click the Keywords tab to display the Keywords pane.
Select the check box next to the keywords that you want to attach to the selected images to mark them. Or, click the marked check boxes next to the keywords that you want to remove from the selected images to disable them.
Digging through your library with keywords
Behold the power of keywords! To sift through your entire collection of images by using keywords, click the Find Photos by Keyword button at the bottom of the iPhoto window. iPhoto displays the Keywords panel, and you can click one or more keyword buttons to display just the photos that carry those keywords.
The images that remain in the viewer after a search must have all the keywords that you specified. If an image is identified, for example, by only three of four keywords you chose, it won't be a match and it won't appear in the viewer.
Playing favorites by assigning ratings
Be your own critic! iPhoto allows you to assign any photo a rating of from 0 to 5 stars. Select one (or more) images, and then assign a rating using one of the following methods:
- Choose Photos --> My Rating, and then choose the desired rating from the pop-up submenu.
- Use the Command+0 through Command+5 shortcuts.
Sorting your images just so
The View menu provides an easy way to arrange your images in the viewer by a number of different criteria. Choose View --> Arrange Photos, and then click the desired sort criteria from the pop-up submenu. You can arrange the display by film roll, date, title, or rating. If you select an album in the source list, you can also choose to arrange photos manually, which means that you can drag and drop thumbnails in the viewer to place them in the precise order you want them.
