How do I use iPhoto effectively?

October 25, 2005 7:59 AM

How do I use iPhoto effectively?

So, I got a mac and I imported all my photos into iPhoto. The question is, what now? Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I can't see how to tag my photos with useful information. I can see how to apply keywords to photos, but I want to select some photos and add a bunch of descriptive text. Is this even possible?
Related questions: How do you organise your photos? So many times I take one or two photos that don't really belong in any particular album. They just lie there in the root directory and I don't know what to do with them.
Are there better (free) alternatives to iPhoto that are worth checking out?

posted by salmacis to computers & internet (13 answers total)

Click the i button at the bottom, and the title/date/comments editor replaces the calendar.

Why do you think you need to put every photo in an album? Just give it a descriptive name so you can find it if you want to see it.
posted by cillit bang at 8:15 AM on October 25, 2005

Give this article a whirl.
posted by dobbs at 8:28 AM on October 25, 2005

Is it just me or is iPhoto unusably slow? Especially when it comes to importing photos off of my 1GB memory over PCMCIA. It brings my entire machine to a stand still for several minutes.
posted by alexst at 9:04 AM on October 25, 2005

I don't know if it will be more effective for you, but here are some of the things I do:

First, before importing photos into iPhoto, I run them through a PhotoShop filter that resizes them down to my maximum screen resolution. I archive off the full un-edited photos, but since hard drive space is at a premium on my PowerBook, I don't want any more photo that I need.

I rename the folder the modified photos sit in so that it's something meaningful to me like Redondo Beach at Sunset.

This way, when I import the photos, the roll gets named whatever the folder name was. This alone makes it very easy to find photos again.

Then, I go through and delete any photos that weren't up to snuff (again, I keep a back-up of everything, but I don't want any more than I need in iPhoto), and rate the others with the star system.

Then, I add a keyword to each photo telling me where the full resolution unmodified originals are in case I ever want to print them or do something else with them.

If I'm going to be posting some of the photos to my web site, or if I just have several good shots from a particular shoot, I will create an album with the very best images. I put these into sub-folderers so that I have a master album category of Nature, Friends, Family, Around Town, Vacations etc.

I view by film rolls which collapses the main library into a bunch of line items that makes it easier to scroll and find the particular photo set that I want.

In iPhoto > preferences > appearance, I tell it to place most recent photos at top. This also helps me find photos again since I typically have a pretty good mental model of when I took a particular photo.

I rarely use the search tool although I can since that finds the roll name as well which is typically meaningful to me.

I never rename the photos.

I also set the thumbnail slider to as small as possible since I have a lot of photos, and I find that makes iPhoto much more responsive. Once I find the set I want, I'll typically slide the thumbnail slider up so that I can view about 3 photos per row.
posted by willnot at 9:21 AM on October 25, 2005 [2 favorites]

Oh, and just in case it isn't clear, the little triangles next to the film rolls will allow you to collapse them. I typically keep my collapsed and only expand them when I want to look at photos for that particular row.
posted by willnot at 9:24 AM on October 25, 2005

Everyone who uses iPhoto needs (needs) Keyword Assistant. You could add as many keywords as you like to all of your photos (Flickr-style) without going through the atrocious iPhoto keyword interface.

At the minimum, I always add keywords to all of my photos indicating the names of the people in the photograph. From there, it's trivial to set up a smart playlist of all of your picture of a particular person, or to find picture taken in a certain place or a certain time.

As far as unorganized photos sitting in your main window… what's the matter with that? The whole point is you can scan through your photos visually and find what you need… it doesn't all need to be split up into hierarchical structures.
posted by designbot at 9:56 AM on October 25, 2005

Oh, and to address your specific question, yes it is possible to add comments to a group of photos at once.

Just select the photos you want to edit, go to Photos > Batch Change… and type in your comments.
posted by designbot at 10:02 AM on October 25, 2005

(Or, as cillit bang mentioned, just click the little "i" button to add comments to one photo at a time.)
posted by designbot at 10:04 AM on October 25, 2005

I've tried time and again to get into iPhoto, but something about the interface just drives me up the wall. I'm not a fan of the slow speed, either. I just hold photos in iPhoto until I get a chance to put them up on Flickr, and then clear them off my computer.
posted by danb at 10:19 AM on October 25, 2005

For what it's worth, Keyword Assistant + FlickrExport makes tagging & posting photos to Flickr a breeze.

Also, turning off drop shadows (iPhoto > Preferences… > Appearance > Border: Drop Shadow) can speed things up considerably if you have an older machine.
posted by designbot at 10:25 AM on October 25, 2005

Thanks for the help so far, guys. I'm still confused about cillit bang's suggestion of clicking the 'i' at the bottom. When I do that, the 'i' turns blue and I get a window giving me information about the photos (like how many there are and when they were taken) but nothing about entering the text like I wanted. (iPhoto 5.0.4)
posted by salmacis at 10:33 AM on October 25, 2005

If you have one photo selected, the info panel should say "comments" at the bottom in grey. You can click there to type. If you have more than one photo selected, "comments" won't be there, and you'll have to choose "Batch Change…" from the Photos menu.
posted by designbot at 10:41 AM on October 25, 2005

nothing about entering the text like I wanted

Click any piece of text that you want to edit.
posted by cillit bang at 1:38 PM on October 25, 2005