The most familiar method of organizing images in iPhoto is the album. Each album can represent any division you like, be it a year, a vacation, your daughter, or your daughter's ex-boyfriends. Follow these steps:

iPhoto also offers a special type of album called a Smart Album, which you can create from the File menu. (For even faster action, hold down the Option key while you click the Add button.) A Smart Album contains only photos that match certain criteria that you choose, using the keywords and rating that you assign your images. Other criteria text in the photo filenames, dates the images were added to iPhoto, and any comments you might have added. Now here's the really nifty angle: iPhoto automatically builds and maintains Smart Albums for you, adding new photos that match the criteria (and deleting those that you remove from your Photo Library)! Smart Albums carry a gear icon in the source list.

You can display information about the currently selected item in the information pane under the source list. Just click the Show Information button at the bottom of the iPhoto window, which sports the familiar "i-in-a-circle" logo. You can also type a short note or description in the Description box that appears in the Information pane. For more in-depth information, select the desired item and then press

You can drag images from the Viewer into any album you choose. For example, you can copy an image to another album by dragging it from the Viewer to the desired album in the Source list.

To remove a photo that has fallen out of favor, follow these steps:

To remove an entire album from the source list, just click it in the source list to select it — in the Viewer, you can see the images that it contains — and then press Delete. (Alternatively, right-click or Control-click the offending album and choose Delete Album from the pop-up menu.)

To rename an album, click the entry under the Albums heading in the Source list to select it and then click again to display a text box. Type the new album name and press Return.

Tip

Change your mind? Daughter's ex is back in the picture, so to speak? iPhoto comes complete with a handy-dandy Undo feature. Just press

As I mention earlier, Events are essentially a group of images that you shot or downloaded at the same time — iPhoto figures that those images belong together (which is usually a pretty safe assumption). Figure 3-3 illustrates some of the Events I've created in my iPhoto collection.

Try moving your cursor over an Event thumbnail in the Viewer and you'll see that iPhoto displays the date range when the images were taken, as well as the total number of images in the Event. Ah, but things get really cool when you move your cursor back and forth over an Event with many images: The thumbnail animates and displays all the images in the Event, without your using old-fashioned scroll bars or silly arrows! (Why can't I think of this stuff? This is the future, dear readers.)

Figure 3.3. Events help you organize by what happened, not just when it happened!

To display the contents of an Event in the Viewer, just double-click the Event thumbnail. To return to the Events thumbnails, click the All Events button at the top of the Viewer.

Tip

Decided to merge those Prom Event pictures with your daughter's Graduation Event? No problem! You could drag one Event thumbnail on top of another, but that's the easy way. Alternatively, click the Events entry under the Library heading in the Source list to display your Events and then hold down

Tip

Whilst organizing, you can create a brand-new empty Event by clicking Events

iPhoto '09 includes two new organizational tools called Faces and Places. These two categories now appear in the Library section of the Source list.

Putting names to faces:

First, let's tackle Faces. This feature is a sophisticated recognition system that automatically recognizes human faces within the photos that you add to your Library. (I don't know whether it works well with pets — but you can try, anyway.) Naturally, you have to identify faces first before iPhoto can recognize them, which it does through a process called tagging.

To tag a face, follow these steps:

After you've tagged an image, it appears in your Faces collection, which you can view by clicking the Faces entry in the Source list. You can click a portrait in your Faces collection to see all the images that contain that person. As you might expect, the more tags you add for a specific person, the better iPhoto gets at recognizing that person!

Putting photos in their place:

Places makes it easy to track the location where photos were taken, but it requires a digital camera that includes GPS tracking information in the image metadata. (This is a relatively new feature for digital cameras, so older models aren't likely to support GPS tracking.) Places also requires an Internet connection, because it uses Google Maps.

Click the Places entry in the Source list to display a global map, with pushpins indicating where your photos were taken. You can switch the Places map between terrain and satellite modes, or choose a hybrid display. If you're familiar with Google Maps, these settings are old friends of yours.

Alternatively, click the List View button to display a character-based browser, where you can click on country, state, and city names.

No matter which view mode you choose, clicking a pushpin or location displays the images taken in that area.

"Okay, Mark, albums, Events, Faces, and Places are great ideas, but there has to be a way to search my collection by category!" Never fear, good MacBook owner. You can also assign descriptive keywords to images to help you organize your collection and locate certain pictures fast. iPhoto comes with a number of standard keywords, and you can create your own as well.

To illustrate, suppose you'd like to identify your images according to special events in your family. Birthday photos should have their own keyword, and anniversaries deserve another. By assigning keywords, you can search for Elsie's sixth birthday or your silver wedding anniversary (no matter what Event or album they're in), and all related photos with those keywords appear like magic! (Well, almost like magic. You need to choose View

iPhoto includes a number of keywords that are already available:

To assign keywords to images (or remove keywords that have already been assigned), select one or more photos in the Viewer. Choose Window

Figure 3.5. Time to add keywords to these selected images.

Click the keyword buttons that you want to attach to the selected images to mark them. Or click the highlighted keyword buttons that you want to remove from the selected images to disable them.

Behold the power of keywords! To sift through your entire collection of images by using keywords, click the magnifying glass button next to the Search box at the bottom of the iPhoto window and then choose Keyword from the pop-up menu. iPhoto displays a pop-up Keywords panel, and you can click one or more keyword buttons to display just the photos that carry those keywords.

You're gonna need your own keywords

I'll bet you take photos of things other than just kids and vacations — and that's why iPhoto allows you to create your own keywords. Display the iPhoto Keywords window by pressing

You can rename an existing keyword from this same window, too. Click a keyword to select it and then click Rename. Remember, however, that renaming a keyword affects all the images that were tagged with that keyword. That might be confusing when, for example, photos originally tagged as Family suddenly appear with the keyword Foodstuffs. To remove an existing keyword from the list, click the keyword to select it and then click the Delete button, which bears a minus sign.

Speaking of ratings ...

Be your own critic! iPhoto allows you to assign any photo a rating of anywhere from zero to five stars. I use this system to help me keep track of the images that I feel are the best in my library. Select one (or more) image and then assign a rating using one of the following methods:

The View menu provides an easy way to arrange your images in the Viewer by a number of different criteria. Choose View

Tip

Naturally, iPhoto allows you to print selected images, but you can also send photos directly to iWeb for use on your MobileMe Web site. Click Share

If an image is in the wrong orientation and needs to be turned to display correctly, click the Rotate button to turn it once in a counterclockwise direction. Hold down the Option key while you click the Rotate button to rotate in a clockwise direction.

Does that photo have an intruder hovering around the edges of the subject? You can remove some of the border by cropping an image, just as folks once did with film prints and a pair of scissors. (We've come a long way.) With iPhoto, you can remove unwanted portions of an image; it's a great way to get Uncle Milton's stray head (complete with toupee) out of an otherwise perfect holiday snapshot.

Follow these steps to crop an image:

Note

iPhoto features multiple Undo levels, so you can press

Figure 3.7. Select the stuff that you want to keep in your photo.

Was your camera slightly tilted when you took the perfect shot? Never fear! Click the Straighten button and then drag the slider to tilt the image in the desired direction. Click the Close button to return to Edit mode.

If a photo looks washed out, click the Enhance button to increase (or decrease) the color saturation and improve the contrast. Enhance is automatic, so you don't have to set anything.

Unfortunately, today's digital cameras can still produce the same "zombies with red eyeballs" as traditional film cameras. Red-eye is caused by a camera's flash reflecting off the retinas of a subject's eyes, and it can occur with both humans and animals. (I'm told pets get green-eye, but iPhoto can handle them, too!)

iPhoto can remove that red- and green-eye and turn frightening zombies back into your family and friends! Click the Red-Eye button and then select a demonized eyeball by clicking in the center of it. (If the new eyeball is too small or too large, drag the Size slider to adjust the dimensions.) To complete the process, click the X in the button that appears in the image.

The iPhoto Retouch feature is perfect for removing minor flecks or lines in an image (especially those you've scanned from prints). Click Retouch and you'll notice that the cursor turns into a crosshair; just drag the cursor across the imperfection.

Ever wonder whether a particular photo in your library would look better as a black-and-white (or grayscale) print? Or perhaps an old-fashioned sepia tone in shades of copper and brown? Just click the Effects button to display the Effects window, which offers eight different effects you can apply to the photo.

Click Adjust to perform manual adjustments to brightness and contrast (the light levels in your image), as well as the sharpness, shadow, and highlight levels. To adjust a value, make sure that nothing's selected in the image and then drag the corresponding slider until the image looks the way you want. Click the Close button to return to Edit mode.