If you’ve got an iCloud account and you turn on My Photo Stream (Using iCloud’s Photo Stream), pictures appear in the Photos app on your iPad, and thus as an album in iPhoto, automatically. Each time a new photo enters your life—when you take a picture with your iPad or iPhone, for example, or import one onto your Mac—it gets added to your photo stream and appears on all your iCloud-connected machines (provided you’ve flicked the photo stream switch on those devices, too). Here’s where to find your pictures:

Figure 13-2. Left: The My Photo Stream album in the Photos app holds your last 1,000 pictures, though they hang around on iCloud’s servers for only 30 days (here it’s shown on an iPhone). To save a picture permanently, tap its thumbnail to select it and then tap the Share icon (circled). Right: When you do that, this screen appears; the blue indicates which pictures will be saved (to select more pictures, tap their thumbnails). When you’re finished, tap “Save to Camera Roll” (circled).

iTunes, as you probably know, is Apple’s free multimedia jukebox program that comes preinstalled on every Mac. It’s been loading music onto iPods since the turn of the 21st century, and you use it to control which digital movies and photos get synced onto your iOS devices.

The syncing process is simple:

After the sync is complete, click the next to your device’s name to disconnect it. Now you’ll be able to wave your iPad around, and people will beg to see your photos.

Apple realizes that your iPad doesn’t have nearly as much memory as your Mac. That’s why it downsizes your photos during a sync. And if you’re only using your iOS device to display photos, either on the device itself or on the Web, then you can get away with far fewer pixels.

But if you’re planning on ordering large prints or creating a hardcover book from your iPad (see Chapter 15), you want the maximum number of pixels, so Apple’s printing companies have more info to work with. The more pixels contained in your photo, the smaller those pixels can be when printed. The goal is to have pixels so small that you can’t see them individually in the printed piece.

To transfer a full-size photo file from your Mac to your iOS device, you have to use iTunes’ file-sharing feature.

First, export the full-size files you want to transfer to your iPad (see Exporting and Converting Pictures for instructions) and put them in a folder. Next, fire up iTunes, connect your iPad to your Mac, click your iPad’s name, and then click the Apps tab. Scroll down until you see the File Sharing section (Figure 13-4, top), and then click iPhoto in the Apps list. At the bottom of the iPhoto Documents section, click Add, and then navigate to the folder where you stored the pictures, select the ones you want, and then click Add. Finally, click iTunes’ Apply button. Your photos will be copied to your iPad, in full-resolution glory, the next time you sync.

Honestly, it’s less harrowing to create your print projects on your Mac rather than on an iPad, because then you don’t have to think about downsized versions vs. full-sized versions at all. Of course, if you’re capturing on your iOS device, then you’re always working with the full-sized versions of those particular photos, so there’s nothing to worry about. (That said, if you order small- to medium-sized prints from an iPad 2, it’s unlikely you’d spot a quality difference between the downsized and full-sized versions anyway.)

Figure 13-4. Top: When you transfer pictures using iTunes’ file-sharing feature, the photos show up only in iPhoto on your iPad, not in the Photos app. Bottom: After you transfer photos, the next time you open iPhoto on your iPad, you see this message. Tap Import; the photos appear in an album named iTunes (tap Albums at the bottom of your screen and scroll down to see it).

If you’ve received a photo via email or instant message, saving it to your Camera Roll so you can access it in iPhoto is super easy.

If the photo arrived via Mail, click the Reply button at the top right of your screen (it looks like a curved arrow) and, in the resulting sheet, click Save Image or Save Video. (If you use a different app for email, then the process may be slightly different.)

If it was delivered via Messages (Apple’s instant-messaging app), tap the at the top right of your screen (see Figure 13-5, top). In the sheet that appears, swipe leftward across the program icons until you see “Open in iPhoto.” Tap it to have your iPad close Messages and open the photo in iPhoto. Alternatively, you can tap Save Image (or Save Video) to stick it in your Camera Roll, which appears as an album in iPhoto.

Figure 13-5. Top: If you received a photo in a text message, tap the at the top right of your screen to see your options for saving the photo. Bottom: If you’re viewing a photo on the Web—say, on Facebook, Flickr, or Twitter—tap and hold the photo to get these options instead.

Saving a picture from the Web is nearly the same process. If you’re viewing a photo on Facebook, Flickr, or Twitter, all you have to do is touch and hold the photo (or video clip) for about a second and a sheet appears (Figure 13-5, bottom). Tap Save Image (or Save Video); your iPad deposits a copy in your Camera Roll.

With AirDrop, you can shoot a photo (or several) from one iOS device to another—wirelessly, securely, and instantly. It’s much faster than emailing or text messaging, since you don’t have to know (or type) the other guy’s address. The photo ends up in your Camera Roll, and in the Camera Roll album in iPhoto. The whole process is described in Chapter 15 (Beaming Photos).

As you recall, albums are a collection of photos and videos shown as a small stack of thumbnails. Tap an album to open it, and you see all the photo and video thumbnails it contains.

The biggest difference between iPhoto albums on your iPad and on your Mac is that you don’t create them manually on your iPad. Instead, iPhoto for iOS creates new albums automatically when you do certain things such as edit, flag, tag or even view a photo.

Albums view is arguably the most useful way to see and work with your photos in iPhoto for iOS, because they’re categorized by the kind of album they’re in. Tap Albums at the bottom of iPhoto’s main screen to see them in these glorious groupings:

No matter which group of photos you’re viewing, tapping a photo’s thumbnail opens it at a larger size, as shown in Figure 13-7. This view includes controls at the top and bottom of your screen that let you do things like edit the picture (Chapter 14), enhance it or rotate it (Auto-Enhancing and Rotating), add flags and tags (Auto-Enhancing and Rotating), share it (Chapter 15), see its info (Viewing Photo Info), turn it into the key photo for an album (Viewing Photo Info), and so on.

Once you’re viewing an individual photo, you see thumbnails of the other photos contained in that particular album on the left or bottom of your screen (see Figure 13-7), depending on how you’re holding your iPad.

Is this as far as you can zoom into your photo, you ask? Heck no. To see deeper into your picture, you can do one of the following:

Figure 13-8. The loupe is like your own personal magnifying glass. You can tap inside it and drag it to another location. To change magnification level, place a finger on either side of the black ring and then rotate your fingers clockwise to zoom in, or counter-clockwise to zoom out. It takes some practice to master the loupe; but once you do, it’s a super slick trick!

Changing an Album’s Key Photo

Once you’re viewing a photo within an album, you can make it that album’s key photo—the picture that represents the album in iPhoto’s main screen.

Simply tap the ellipsis (…) at the bottom right of your screen (see Figure 13-10) and, in the resulting pane, tap “Set as Key Photo.”

Figure 13-9. The Info button shows you all kinds of useful tidbits about your photo, including its exposure settings (helpful for learning how to improve your photography). To hide the extra data, tap the Info button again or tap anywhere on the photo.

Figure 13-10. Feel free to change an album’s representative picture using the Options icon (it looks like an ellipsis). If the “Set as Key Photo” option is dimmed, then iPhoto won’t let you change the key photo for that particular album. The program lets you change key photos only for albums you create on your Mac and sync to the iPad, as well as Favorites, Tags, Events, Apps, and Faces. So albums like Camera Roll and photo streams are off limits.

Flagging, “Favoriting,” and Tagging Photos

When you mark photos by adding flags to them, designating them as favorites, or adding tags to them, iPhoto groups them into albums so you can easily find them in Albums view (Viewing Albums).

You can use these markers to mean anything you want. For example, you might flag photos that you want to delete (flags are discussed in depth on Flagging Photos), and you might “favorite” photos that you want to add to a web journal (Web Journals) or a Facebook album (Mail). (Favorites are an iPhoto for iOS–only feature; you can’t designate favorites in iPhoto for Mac.) Either way, Figure 13-11 shows you how to get the job done.

Tip

If you tap and hold the flag icon, you see a menu with these options: Flag All, Unflag All, Last 24 Hours, Last 7 Days, or Multiple. The first two flag or unflag all the photos in the current album. Choose Last 24 Hours or Last 7 Days to flag only those photos you’ve taken or imported within those time periods within that album. Or tap Multiple and then use the thumbnail grid on the left to pick all the photos you want to flag. When you tap Done, iPhoto flags all the thumbnails you selected.

Tagging, on the other hand, is a way to add keywords to your pictures in iPhoto for iOS (for more on keywords, see Keywords). Oddly, any keywords you’ve applied in iPhoto on your Mac don’t transfer over to your iPad.

To add a custom tag to a photo, tap the tag icon beneath it and then tap Enter New Tag (see Figure 13-12). When the keyboard appears, type away; tap Done when you’re finished to see the white tag appear on the photo’s thumbnail. You can add as many tags as you want to your photos; each tag gets its own album in the Tags category of Albums view.

Figure 13-11. To flag or “favorite” a photo (or both), tap the flag or heart icon beneath it. When you add a flag, the icon turns orange; when you designate a favorite, the heart icon turns red. You’ll also see a white flag and/or white heart appear on the photo in the thumbnail grid. To unflag or unfavorite a photo, just tap the appropriate icon again.

To remove a tag from a photo, tap the tag icon, and then tap the tag’s name.

Tip

You can create a default tag, which iPhoto applies as soon as you tap the tag icon, saving you from having to tap again to select a tag in the list. To set a default tag, tap the tag icon, enter the tag’s name, and then tap Done; next, tap the right side of the Tags pane, next to the tag’s name. When you do, a little tag outline appears, indicating that it’s now the default (this icon is circled in Figure 13-12, left). iPhoto lets you assign only one default tag, but you can change it anytime you want.

Figure 13-12. Left: Once you’ve entered some tags, iPhoto lists them in the Tags pane. To apply a previously entered tag, tap it and a blue checkmark appears next to it. Right: Tapping Edit summons this pane where you can tap a tag to select it; tap the red circle that appears to delete it (you can delete only tags that aren’t applied to any photos). Drag the horizontal lines to the tag’s right up or down to reposition the tag in the list.

As you flag photos, the label at the top of iPhoto’s thumbnail grid changes to show you how many photos you’ve flagged (see Figure 13-13, left). For example, if you’re viewing an album of 138 pictures and you’ve flagged 3, the label reads “138 Photos (3 [flag]).” (Oddly, this label doesn’t keep track of photos you’ve favorited or hidden.)

But that’s not all. If you tap this label, you reveal a Filter pane that lets you see only the photos that you’ve messed with, as Figure 13-13 explains. The same pane also lets you change the sort order of your pictures. From the factory, thumbnails are shown in chronological order, oldest first. Tap Newest First, and you reverse that order.

When you first open the Filter pane, it’s set to Simple, which lets you tap criteria that iPhoto uses to determine which pictures to display. By clicking Advanced, you get even more options: Tap a green circle to include photos with that particular feature, and tap inside a red circle to exclude them. Tap Any to have iPhoto show you pictures that match any of the criteria you set; tap All to have iPhoto show you only those photos that match all of the criteria you’ve picked.

Figure 13-13. Left: To see only the photos you’ve flagged, “favorited,” tagged, hidden, or even edited, tap the label at the top of the album’s thumbnail grid, and then tap the type of items you want iPhoto to display (the more you’ve messed with your photos, the more criteria you see). Photos that don’t match are temporarily hidden. To see all the album’s photos again, open the Filter pane and tap All Items. Right: Tapping Advanced lets you choose multiple criteria for your photo-viewing pleasure.

To have iPhoto sift through the album you’re viewing and find all the similar shots, just double-tap a thumbnail in the grid. If iPhoto finds similar shots—and they have to be nearly identical for this to work—iPhoto selects them in the thumbnail grid and shows them to you side by side in the viewing area (see Figure 13-14).

To view multiple photos that are next to each other in the thumbnail grid, you’ll need two fingers. Simultaneously tap the first and last thumbnails in the range you want to see; iPhoto displays the selected pictures (as well as all the ones in between) in the viewing area.

Figure 13-14. If iPhoto can locate similar shots, they appear in the viewing area. Your photos have to be incredibly similar for this to work. For example, if you double-tap the thumbnail circled here, iPhoto displays just one similar photo (even though there are several shots of this flower in this album). If iPhoto finds a match, and you’ve got your iPad’s sound turned on, you hear a chirping xylophone sound. If it can’t find any similar pictures, you hear a single chirp instead, and iPhoto displays only the photo you double-tapped.

To view multiple photos that aren’t next to each other in the thumbnail grid, tap one photo and then tap and hold each additional photo. You can also drag a photo from the thumbnail grid into the viewing area.

To deselect a photo, swipe down across it in the viewing area, or tap and hold its thumbnail in the grid.