Learning iPhoto
Managing Your Digital Photos
01 January 2006 Emily Hambidge Skip to comments
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Emily Hambidge shows you how to unlock the power behind your digital pictures with Apple's iPhoto 5. She covers importing, editing and sharing your photos among other topics.
Digital photos are one of the most common reasons that people use their computers. Whether it’s emailing Grandma the last picture of Susie’s ballet pageant or printing this year’s Christmas card picture, computers have made sharing our memories easier than ever. The problem with digital photography lies in how to organize it. There are a million sites such as Shutterfly and Flickr that offer a solution for sharing your photos online, but what about keeping them organized on your Mac? Every Mac comes pre-installed with iPhoto as part of the iLife suite.
In this article, the first in a new series of articles for Mac beginners, we will talk about how to get the most out of iPhoto. iPhoto has many of the features that you have come to expect from Apple’s application. You can rate your photos, organize them into different albums, create slideshows and search for photos with an iTunes-like interface. The best part about iPhoto is how easy it is to use. From uploading your pictures to creating photo albums and having them delivered to your door, Apple makes preserving your memories fun and simple.
Importing Photos
The first thing you have to do is get your pictures on your Mac. To do this, you will need to hook up your digital camera to your computer. Simply take the USB cable that came with your camera and plug one end into your camera and connect the other end to your Mac. After a few seconds, iPhoto will recognize your camera and launch automatically. Your iPhoto screen will tell you that it is ready to import items.
Note: This is the same if you have a memory card reader. Just put your card into the card reader and plug your card reader into your Mac.
You will have two choices when you upload your pictures. You can erase the original images from the camera or you can just put them on your Mac. Be careful not to ignore this step because you could easily remove all the pictures from your camera by accident. If you want to keep the photos on your camera make sure you uncheck the box that says “Delete items from camera after importing.”
On this screen you can also label the album and give a description of your photos. What you type here is up to you. I tend to label my album something like “Christmas 2005” and leave the description blank. Whatever you type in here will be attached to every picture that you are uploading. So, if you have several events on one memory card it might be best to do this for each individual picture instead of the entire roll.
When you are done with this, go ahead and click the “Import” button. Now, it will take a few seconds for your pictures to upload depending on the speed of your computer and the amount of pictures you are trying to transfer. You will notice that thumbnails of your pictures appear as they are uploading. After your photos are finished uploading you are ready to dig deeper into iPhoto.
A Place for Everything
One of my favorite things about iPhoto is how easy it makes organizing pictures. I am not a professional photographer, but I do like to keep my photos tidy. iPhoto offers several ways to organize photos. You will notice that there is a button that says “Library” in the top left corner. Any picture that you import into iPhoto will be in this library. If you want to keep photos organized in smaller albums all you have to do is click on the + button at the bottom of the screen. Like in iTunes, this will create a new album. Type in your label and the album is created. To get certain photos into this album you can simply drag and drop them from the main library.
By having your pictures in different albums you can easily create a real photo album or a slideshow. These two features may seem intimidating, but as we continue with this tutorial you will see that they are just as easy as importing your pictures. Let’s start with creating a slideshow.
Click on the album you want to use for your slideshow and then click on the play button at the bottom of the screen - the triangle. This will create a new entry. If your album was called “Mom’s birthday,” it will now also have an entry that says “Mom’s birthday slideshow.” This allows you to make changes to pictures for your slideshow without changing them in your album. Once you have created the slideshow you can play around with it. At the top of your screen will be thumbnails of all of your photos. At the bottom will be several options for editing your slideshow.
Note: Depending on which version of iPhoto you are using, ways to organize your slideshow will vary. This tutorial was written for iPhoto 5, but it can be easily adapted to earlier versions.
With the thumbnails at the top, you can choose the order you want your pictures to appear. Once you get your pictures in the desired order we can add music and transitions. The best way to understand transitions is just to play with them. We will cover the basics, though. You have two options with transitions: you can use one for the entire slideshow or you can assign different transitions for each photo. If you use the same transition it’s very easy. Click on “settings” at the bottom and choose which transition you would like to use. To apply individual transitions you will want to go to the row at the top. Start at the beginning and click on your first picture. Once it is highlighted go to the bottom of the screen and pick a transition. Now your transition is applied only to the picture you have chosen. You can do this for each picture. iPhoto makes previewing this easy. If you want to make sure everything is working, simply click on “Preview” at the bottom of the screen and watch what you have created. Once you are happy with your transitions let’s add some music.
Thanks to Apple’s careful integration of its applications, iPhoto works hand-in-hand with iTunes. To add music, click on the iTunes icon at the bottom of the screen. A list of your music will pop up and you can select the song you would like to use. And don’t worry about your song being the right length for your slideshow. When you pick your song, check the box that says “Fit slideshow to music.” This will ensure that your pictures and your music start and end at the same time.
If you select a song that is too short for all of your pictures, iTunes should give you a warning. When this warning pops up click on “continue” to either increase the length of your music or adjust the number of photos you are using.
Finding your Photos
As you accumulate more photos they can be hard to find. There are several ways you can search for pictures with iPhoto. You can look by album title, photo title, keyword, date, rating, comments or roll titles. Of course, to use all of these search criteria you will have to label every picture with all of this data.
To search by a keyword or title, just type what you are looking for into the search bar. As long as you have labeled all of your pictures appropriately, the search should return what you are looking for.
You can also sort your photos by certain criteria by clicking on View -> Sort Photos -> By criteria.
Searching by date is easy, too. The caldendar on iPhoto lets you search by year, month or even a specific date. To get your calendar to appear click on the button at the bottom of your screen that looks like a caldendar. It is in between the key symbol and the “i.” To get different calendars just toggle between them. Notice that iPhoto will bold the dates you took pictures. To see what photos you took on a specific day just click on the bolded date and your pictures will pop up.
Old-fashioned scrapbooks
Not everyone has a computer or likes to look at pictures on one. Apple had those people in mind, so they let you design real custom photo albums from your iPhotos. The possibilities behind the photos albums are endless. You can give them as gifts or keep them on your coffee table to share your memories with everyone. The best part about these albums is that they are created by you!
These photo albums come it different shapes and sizes. There are options for every budget, too.
Making the albums is easy. First, you want to make an album just like you did with your slideshow. For practice, let’s just use the same album. Once you have done this click on the “book” button at the bottom of the page. You will be prompted to choose a theme for your book. Once you do this you will want to arrange your pictures and your text. Just drag and drop the photos where you want them and enter whatever text you’d like.
You’re done! How easy was that? Now, we just need to get your book ordered. Click on the “order” button. During this step you will also be allowed to pick the color of your book.
Ordering Prints
If you’re like my mother, you love making your own scrapbooks but aren’t all that interested in the digital side of everything. iPhoto has an option for you, too. You can order your iPhoto prints through Kodak and have them shipped to your home. They will be just like any pictures you get printed at the local convenient store and come at the competitive price of $0.19 each for a 4×6 print.
Again, you want to pick the pictures you want to order. You can do this by placing them in an album, or you can highlight the pictures you want. To highlight more than one picture hold down CTRL while you click on the pictures. Once you have all of them selected, click on “order prints” at the bottom of your screen. You will probably have to create a log in with Apple and then you will be asked to select the number of pictures you want and what size you want.
Now, just give them your billing information and your prints should be to you soon. I always pick standard shipping and almost always have my pictures in three days.
Editing Your Photos
There is one more iPhoto feature I want to talk about: editing your pictures. It is slightly more advanced and not all that necessary if you are just playing around with family photos, but we’ll dabble in it anyway. I am going to recommend that you learn the same way I did: trial and error. I’ll get you started, but don’t be afraid to just play around with different settings. You can always undo things that you don’t like.
Note: Before editing anything it’s important to make a copy of the picture you are working with so that you don’t lose the original. To make a copy go to Photos -> Duplicate.
The part you are going to need to play with is the advanced editing feature. To get to this you are going to want to select a picture and double-click it. The options at the bottom should change and you should see an advanced button. Click on that. Here is where you can edit the contrast, saturation, tint, brightness, etc. Play around with this buttons and figure out what they do to your picture.
Other things you might want to edit are red-eye, blemishes or what is in the picture. To eliminate red-eye click on the button and then click in the center of the affected eye. This should erase the problem. Sometimes it can also get areas surrounding the eyes, so be sure you are as precise as possible. You can always undo what you did and try again.
Retouch is another tool you’ll want to be familiar with. I have to say that I haven’t had the best results with retouch, but we’ll give it a try. Again, pick the picture you want to work with. Find the problem area and click on the retouch button. Use this tool just like a paint brush. Run it across the problem area a few times and it should be fixed. Like I said, this doesn’t always work for me, but that’s how it’s supposed to be done.
Finally, let’s play with cropping. This is one of my favorite tools because it can get rid of the silly people in the background of your pictures. Get the picture you want ready, then click and drag your mouse across it. You will notice that one area of the photo is being highlighted. Position the mouse so that you are highlighting only the part of the picture that you want to keep. Then click on crop and your photo should resize to be exactly what you want.
Tips and Tricks
There are a few other things about iPhoto that you will want to be aware of:
- Storing pictures takes up a lot of space on your computer. As your collection grows you will want to consider storing them on a seperate hard drive. This also helps keep your photos safe if your computer were to crash.
- One great way to battle your storage problem is to use iPhoto Diet, a utility that helps slim down your library. iPhoto Diet eliminates duplicate photos and gets rid of unnecessary file that are stealing space on your hard drive. Every time you change a photo, iPhoto keeps a copy of the new and the original. iPhoto Diet gets rid of the originals. The program is easy to install and use. For more information, check out the homepage.
- You can adjust the size of the thumbnails in your library. I like to keep my thumbnails small, but my mom likes them to be bigger and easier to see. To adjust the size go to the horizonal scroll bar in the bottom right-hand corner.
- Want to share your pictures online? No problem! There are two easy ways to do this: buy a .Mac account or join Flickr. .Mac accounts are about $100/year and Flickr is free, but if you want to be allowed to upload up to 1GB per month it’s $24.95. Uploading to a .Mac account is a cinch - just click on the “Homepage” icon at the bottom and follow the steps. Using Flickr is just as easy. First, download Connected Flow’s FlickrExport. This is a free service, and I would highly recommend it. After you sign up for a Flickr account click on Share -> Export and select “Flickr.”
iPhoto Keyword Assistant is another tool you might want to get. The homepage says: Keyword Assistant is a plugin for iPhoto to make keyword management easier. The main feature is an auto-completing text field for assigning keywords. This is much faster than using the built-in keyword panel.
Keywording is another word for tagging your photos and is helpful if you are looking for pictures of a certain person in your library. For example, if you just want to look at pictures that have your brother Sam in them you can just type “Sam” into the keyword search and pull those pictures up.
Drag the dot until you get your pictures to the size you want. Moving it to the right will make the thumbnails bigger. Moving it to the left will make them smaller.
MacZealots previously reviewed iPhoto 5.0. If you are interested in reading the review it can be found here.
This article is the first in a series of tutorials for beginning Mac users. The MacZealots’ team wants our site to be as useful as possible for every Mac user. If there are topics you would like to see explored, please email me or leave a comment below.
Emily Hambidge is the editor and public relations guru for MacZealots. She was forced into the world of Macs by her geeky boyfriend. In order to keep her sanity and relationship afloat, Emily now embraces everything Macintosh. You can read her personal blog or contact her at
Reader Comments (9)
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#1) On January 1, 2006 10:01 PM
“Note: Before editing anything it’s important to make a copy of the picture you are working with so that you don’t lose the original. To make a copy go to Photos -> Duplicate.”
This is unecessary as iPhoto already keeps a copy of the original, you can always revert an edited photo to the original version by choosing Photos->Revert to original
#2) On January 1, 2006 10:06 PM
Not if you use iPhoto Diet…
#3) On January 4, 2006 12:54 PM
The whole concept of reverting to the original is very cool. Because of this I would not recommend iPhoto Diet for a newcommer. If you have a 40 or a 60 gig harddisk saving 2 gigs by using iPhoto Diet is not worth the risk of losing your original photos. Internal and external disk space is sooooo cheap and archiving is sooooo easy, why bother?
#4) On January 5, 2006 5:12 AM
i was wondering if i was to put my iphoto library (the files named 2001 to 2005) in a new directory of the parent named ‘last year’, thus moving it forward a level, when i photo starts up, i specify to use the 2006 folder so i can reduce some of the on screeen existences of last years rolls, would that work?
what do you reckon the chances of asking apple to mod the scource list are? i think it would be cool if it were a file browser with a seperate scourcelist.
not on tiger by the way.
#5) On January 5, 2006 5:14 AM
yeah, loose the diet, just delete the photos you dont want, dont get lazy now.
i dont realy see the point with duplicating images to edit them thats pointless, either revert to original, or edit in another program, save somewhere else !! duh
#6) On January 28, 2006 3:25 PM
Can I type text to my pictures in iphoto?
#7) On February 13, 2006 2:16 AM
I’ve got HEAPS of photos on the 5MB variety on my iphoto.
I went to download more, and the whole iphoto crashed.
I found each original (i think) thru ‘my computer’, but how do i get iphoto back?
I tried rebooting it from applications.
Do i have to get a separate harddrive and backup all files, then reboot the entire computer with my original disk of applications?
Cheers.
#8) On February 15, 2006 6:12 PM
Mac G4 crashed. Lost my photo albums. They are on my Ipod. How do I upload those photos from Ipod back to the Mac.
Any ideas?
#9) On March 19, 2006 5:51 AM
Assisting my husband and his team designing our client’s wedding book is a great job. But loosing some pictures from the book while assembling it is another story since I have to start everything from the beginning again. I am talking about an 80 pages wedding book that covers up to 150-200 pictures.
I URGENTLY NEED HELP/EXPLANATIONS. iphoto SHOULD BE MORE PRACTICAL and QUICKER than pagemaker, right?
Cheers