Wednesday, September 19, 2007

iPhoto

I've had some time recently to start getting iPhoto populated with my photo collection. I've had to make some adjustments to how I sort photos though and I am not sure exactly how I feel about that yet.

On my Windows machine I had a folder based structure that was organized by years. Inside each of those folders was a folder for different events such as birthdays, parties, etc. iPhoto 08 introduces a new feature called "Events" that attempts to automatically find groups of events in your photos and put them together. It eliminates and sorts of folder based organization and stores everything on its own behind the scenes. I've found that the Events structure works out nicely along with some manual configuration but there isn't a good way to just have a Misc section to throw junk pictures in.

It does make it pretty quick to find pictures and look at different events. I would like to know how to set tags and labels for pictures in order to find them by searching for related information. Does anyone know how to do this in iPhoto?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Any more info? Or is it over?

Anonymous said...

I also am looking forward to more of your analysis as I am considering switching.

Anonymous said...

The switch has been so awesome he no longer even remembers he did this experiment! :-P I would kinda like to see how it's going also.

Anonymous said...

I have been a pc user all my life and I am now using my wife's powerbook G4 and like it a lot. However, yesterday in fact, she came to me and asked me how to post a picture that she had imported from her camera using iphoto on her blog. Impossible to find the picture from the file browser because of this stupid iphotos library package. There does not seem to be any way of telling Iphoto to import the pictures in the user/pictures folder, instead it's putting it in it's library which is only reachable from the shell, or if you do "show file" in Iphoto. Painful. Why does apple do this?

MB-switcher said...

wondering also if the experiment is still going...

Aaron B. (Snicker) said...

I have found that you have to either commit fully to iPhoto or not at all. I have converted all of my existing pictures into iPhoto and use it to store and manage my images.

It's a little different at first not having direct control but I've found it is very easy to retrieve pictures. When you try and upload to your blog and are in the file selection screen just search for part of the file name. The search results will include your iPhoto store.

Have you looked at the upcoming 10.5 release? It has some improvements to Finder which appear to be pretty good.

Anonymous said...

I can't rememeber what it was like back then, but you can actually go into Pictures>iPhoto Library and then grab your photo. Apple might not be what you're use to or have exactly the same things, but it is running circles around Microsoft's development team.