iPhoto '09: The Missing Manual

Chapter 3. Five Ways to Flag and Find Photos

The more you get into digital photography, the more pictures you’ll probably store in iPhoto. And the more pictures you store in iPhoto, the more urgently you’ll need ways to find them again—to pluck certain pictures out of this gigantic, seething haystack of digital files.

Fortunately, iPhoto ’09 is equally seething with search mechanisms. You can find pictures by the text inside them (name, location, description, Event, and so on); by the date you took them; by the keywords you’ve tagged them with; or by the ratings you’ve given them. You can also use iPhoto ’09’s flagging feature to find, and later round up, any arbitrary photos you like.

This chapter covers all five methods.

Flagging Photos

Here’s a simple, sweet feature in iPhoto ’09: You can flag, or mark, a photo.

So what does the flag mean? Anything you want it to mean; it’s open to a multitude of personal interpretations. The bottom line, though, is that you’ll find this marker extremely useful for temporary organizational tasks.

For example, you might want to cull only the most appropriate images from a photo album for use in a printed book or slideshow. As you browse through the images, use the Flag button to flag each shot you want. Later, you can round up all of the images you flagged so that you can drag them all into a new album en masse.

How to Flag a Photo

Here are two ways to flag a selected photo, or a bunch of selected photos:

• Press ⌘-period, or choose Photos→Flag Photo.