7. Viewing Your Photos
In this chapter, you learn how to view the photos you’ve taken.
→ Working with photo thumbnails
→ Using the film roll
→ Sorting your photos
Although iPhoto lets you organize your photos in a variety of ways, from albums and events to Faces and Places, the end goal of that organization is that you can actually view individual pictures quickly and easily. For this, iPhoto has a few, but important, tools to help you view that amazing pic.
Working with Photo Thumbnails
A thumbnail is a miniature representation of your larger photograph. While looking inside an album, event, or your entire photo library, a thumbnail enables you to see multiple photos at once, which helps you find the one you are looking for faster.
Adjust Thumbnail Size
By default, a thumbnail is of a medium size in iPhoto. However, you can manually adjust the size of thumbnails to make them larger and easier to view, or smaller, which allows you to see more images at once.
1. Select an event, album, or the Photos header in iPhoto’s source list so your photographs are displayed as thumbnails in the body of iPhoto.
2. In the iPhoto toolbar, drag the Zoom slider left or right. Dragging it to the left shrinks the thumbnail size; dragging it to the right increases the thumbnail size.
Quickly Rotating Photos
When viewing thumbnails, if you notice a photo in your album or event is rotated the wrong way—for example, it’s horizontal when it should be vertical—you can quickly rotate it by right-clicking the photo and then selecting Rotate from the contextual menu.
View an Individual Photo
After you’ve found the photo you want to view in your thumbnails, bringing it full screen in iPhoto’s main viewing window is easy.
1. Press the spacebar on your keyboard to see it full screen, or double-click the photo.
2. The photo expands until it fills the entire frame of iPhoto’s viewing window.
Working with the Film Roll
When you’re viewing a photo full screen, the toolbar at the bottom of iPhoto’s window changes to display a film roll. This film roll shows thumbnails of all the other photos in the selected album or event. It’s handy for quickly skimming through the other pictures associated with the one you are viewing.
1. Move your mouse over the film roll. The film roll enlarges on your screen.
2. Scroll through the film roll using your mouse’s cursor until you find a photo you want to view.
3. Click the photo you want to view, and it displays in iPhoto’s window, replacing the previous one.
Sorting the Order of Your Photos
iPhoto enables you to sort the display order for your photos and events. By default, iPhoto shows you your events, and your photos inside albums and events, from oldest to newest. However, you can change the setting so you can sort the display order of your photos and events to better fit your workflow.
2. Choose View, Sort Events.
3. Choose one of the following ways to sort events:
• By Date: Arranges events by the date on which they were taken, from oldest to newest
• By Title: Arranges events alphabetically by their titles
• Manually: Lets you drag events into any order you want
4. If you sort your events by Title or Date, you can reverse the order of the sort by choosing View, Sort Events and then choosing Ascending or Descending.
5. Click Reset Manual Sort to revert to iPhoto’s manual sort order.
Sort Photos
1. Select the album or double-click the event containing the photographs you want to sort.
2. Choose View, Sort Photos.
3. Choose to sort photos by one of the following options:
• By Date: Arranges events by the date on which they were taken, from oldest to newest.
• By Title: Arranges events alphabetically by their titles.
• Manually: Lets you drag events into any order you want. This option is not available for photos inside events or smart albums.
• By Rating: Sorts photos from lowest (no stars) to highest (five stars) rating.
4. If you sort your events by Title, Date, or Rating, you can can reverse the order of the sort by choosing View, Sort Photos and then choosing Ascending or Descending.
5. Click Reset Manual Sort to revert to iPhoto’s manual sort order.
Auto Manual Sort
Be aware that whatever your sort setting, if you drag a photo in an album to a new position, iPhoto automatically switches to manual sorting again.