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Organisation in iPhoto
In the two weeks I've had the new MacBook Pro I've been quietly ignoring the piles of DVDs sitting on my desk. These don't contain movies (those are elsewhere); they are simply backups of several years of digital photographs. To say I've got quite a few pictures there is an understatement.
My first thought when picking up the laptop was to accompany it with a copy of Aperture; however I quickly decided to give iPhoto a serious run instead. After all, it was bundled with the Mac, and I really didn't know anything about it.
Today was designated a photo-sorting day. A few hours' copying photos to the iPhotos library (from the backup DVDs) took me about a third of the way through the first pile; nowhere near completion but it gave me around twenty thousand images to play with in iPhoto. The first thing to do was to organise them a bit.
This organisation incorporated several techniques, a few of which are outlined below. Behind each of them was the idea that it must be a simple, easily repeatable process as well as being automatic wherever possible.
Smart albums
iPhoto's Smart albums operate in the same way as Smart playlists do in iTunes. The album is always automatically generated based on the current contents of the library, based upon criteria you define at the start. Of particular benefit were the 'recent roll' Smart albums as discussed in Macworld. From the article :
In particular, I find the last roll album quite useful when I want to see just my newest pictures. However, sometimes I’d also like to see the second or third newest. You might think you’d be able to do this by just telling iPhoto to show two or three albums in the last roll album, and you’d be right. If you want to have the five newest rolls always available in their own albums, though, the preferences setting won’t help—Smart Albums will.Keyword Manager Bullstorm's Keyword Manager is a great iPhoto plugin that succeeds in performing one task extremely well. As you've no doubt guessed from the title, Keyword Manager greatly simplifies and enhances the task of assigning keywords to photos. Not only is it fast and straightforward; the ability to create your own hierarchical keyword structures is superb. NB: Keywords are shown using View -> Keywords. Ratings The ratings feature of iPhoto is a powerful tool which I can't help thinking is often overlooked. After all, assigning a rating to each photo is not exactly as exciting as life gets. However, having the photos rated allows a more creative use of slideshows and the creation of powerful Smart Albums. At the very least, a 'Best of' smart album containing only photographs with a 5 star rating is great for showing to friends, relatives and potential clients. An automatically updated portfolio if you will. With this last thought in mind (an automatically updated portfolio) I created a simple smart album which contained only 5 star photos, taken anywhere at any time. It was then time to quickly scan through the various collections and pick out the cream of the crop, with fingers poised over the CMD-5 keys. A little effort, but well worthwhile. This smart album now forms the basis of a desktop image, screensaver and slideshow. NB: Ratings are shown using View -> My Rating. Titles When it comes to tagging photos en-masse with great searchable information, Titles are right up there with Keywords. For each album my process is :
- select all photos taken at a particular location
- use the 'batch change' feature (Photos -> Batch Change) to set the title to the name of the location
- select a few images at a time and further refine these titles
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