iPhoto Guide

iPhoto makes organising your photos easy as you can sort them in a number of ways such as by event, location and even by who is in the photos. iPhoto allows you to mix these up to create what are known as smart folders. For example you can sort out and view just the photos of your sister on holiday in Spain in one simple step. This user guide will explain all these features in more detail.

Events

When you download your photos onto iPhoto they will automatically be placed into folders called events, these photos help you to keep your photos organised according to when the pictures were taken, however to make things easier such as putting all your pictures from the summer months together you can merge event albums however you like.

Faces

The face recognition tool in iPhoto will automatically pick up on faces in your photos and let you tag them with names. This may seem like an impossible task when you are faced with thousands of photos but once you have tagged a few photos with names iPhoto will suggest faces that match the names for you and all you have to do is confirm iPhotos suggestions. If you have a lot of photos that are assigned to the correct name instead of clicking each one individually you can drag a marquee around them and with one click confirm that they are correct. Sometimes however iPhoto may get this a bit wrong and suggest the wrong faces but the more photos of a particular person you tag the more accurate iPhotos suggestions become. I would suggest you tag about 15 photos from the initial selection and then refresh the selection, you will find that the suggested photos are far better the second time around and as before you can also reject a group of incorrect pictures by dragging a marquee around them and double clicking. When you have tagged the people in your photos they are placed on a virtual cork board for you to view all the pictures of a certain person in the same place.

Places

An addition to the latest version of iPhoto (iPhoto 09) is the 'places' feature which allows you to assign a location to your pictures. If you have a GPS enabled camera (such as the one on the iPhone) when you download your photos the location will automatically be added to the photos information. If your camera does not have inbuilt GPS you can still tag your pictures with a place name and iPhoto will place it on a map powered by Google. You can then look at your photo library with a map view and see where all your pictures were taken. So for example it is very easy to instantly view all the pictures you took on your holidays in Spain.

Sharing

iPhoto has addressed the idea of sharing your photos through social networking sites as it includes direct up-loaders for both Facebook and Flickr. Uploading with these is very simple you just select the photos you want to upload and click on the relevant icon. Initially you will have to log into your account but after that you just choose your viewing permissions and picture size (Flickr only) and then upload. Due to Facebook also having face tagging facilities when you upload an image tagged in iPhoto if the associated email address matches with one of your Facebook friends it will also automatically be tagged in Facebook. This process works both ways as if someone tags one of your Facebook pictures and it matches with an email on iPhoto your iPhoto image will also be tagged. Once your images have been uploaded you can add captions etc in the usual way.

Smart Albums

All of the above features can be combined to create what are known as 'smart albums'. You just need to click on File | New Smart Album and select your criteria from the drop down menus (as many options as you like can added) and when you add new pictures to iPhoto and they match this criteria they too will also be added to that particular smart album.

I hope this guide has helped you to understand how iPhoto helps you to organise your digital photos in a fun and easy way.