Working with iPhoto

One of the things the Wife wants to do with the iMac is work with our photos. We've taken mostly digital photos for a while now, and they've been sitting in a rather big mess on our old computer. So it's time to learn iPhoto.

Bringing them over was a snap. I got connected to our Windows box, opened iPhoto, dragged them over, waited for maybe 15 minutes while all 1500 were loaded, and voila, there they were.

It took me a little playing, though, to figure out the philosophy of iPhoto. The Library, it seems, is where the photos go. They're there, they're always there, and unless you want them deleted, they'll stay there. Under Library are year folders, letting you see pics shot in that year. This wasn't completely accurate, as some of our newer shots had a 2002 date on them, but I blame the Walmart Photo CD for that goof (as that's who assigned the date for those shots, I think).

My original thought was that I'd drag photos out of Library and into albums, and then from there into sub-albums, and so on. But when I did the dragging, the photo (as mentioned above) stayed in Library. So how do I know what photos have been categorized, and which haven't? Harumph!

A bit more digging, and I found a nice solution: Smart Albums. Turns out, these are basically a search of the library for shots that meet certain criteria. I created one that lists photos not in any other album, and I got my list of shots left to be categorized. The only minor problem is that Smart Albums don't always refresh right away, but if you edit the criteria, change nothing, and say OK, it forces a refresh manually.

The other minor hiccup in my original plan is that apparently, dragging and dropping works to move things into an album, but not out of one. Cut and paste do the trick, though, so we're in business.

Now we just have 1500 pictures to go through...