iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Working with Your Photos

All right: You’ve gotten the hang of the Source list, the Photo Library, and film rolls. Enough learning about iPhoto; it’s time to start using iPhoto.

Scrolling Through Your Photos

Browsing, selecting, and opening photos is straightforward. Here’s everything you need to know:

• Use the vertical scroll bar to navigate through your thumbnails.

  Tip

  If your photos scroll by too fast for you to find the ones you want, try using iPhoto’s Slow Scroll mode. Hold down the Option key while dragging the scroll box in the scroll bar. You get a much slower, smoother scroll, making it easier to navigate to a specific row of thumbnails.

• Scrolling can take awhile if you have a lot of images in your Photo Library, especially if you haven’t collapsed the film rolls you’re not using, as described earlier. But you can use this standard Mac OS X trick for faster navigation: Instead of dragging the scroll box or clicking the scroll bar arrows, Option-click the portion of the scroll bar that corresponds to the location you want in your Photo Library. If you want to jump to the bottom of the Photo Library, Option-click near the bottom of the scroll bar. To find photos in the middle of your collection, Option-click the middle portion of the scroll bar, and so on.

  Note

  By turning on “Scroll to here” in the General panel of your System Preferences, you can make this the standard behavior for Mac OS X scroll bars—that is, you won’t need the Option key.

• Press your Page Up and Page Down keys ...