iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

Chapter 4. Camera Meets Mac

The Ansel Adams part of your job is over. Your digital camera is brimming with photos. You’ve snapped the perfect graduation portrait, captured that jaw-dropping sunset over the Pacific, or compiled an unforgettable photo essay of your two-year-old attempting to eat a bowl of spaghetti. It’s time to use your Mac to gather, organize, and tweak all these photos so you can share them with the rest of the world.

This is the core of this book—compiling, organizing, and adjusting your pictures using iPhoto and then transforming this random collection of digital photos into a professional-looking slideshow, set of prints, movie, Web page, poster, email, desktop picture set, or bound book.

But before you start organizing and publishing these pictures using iPhoto, they have to find their way from your camera to the Mac. This chapter explains how to get pictures from camera to computer and introduces you to iPhoto.

iPhoto: The Application

iPhoto approaches digital photo management as a four-step process:

• Import. Working with iPhoto begins with feeding your digital pictures into the program. During the import process, iPhoto duplicates your pictures and stores them in its Photo Library folder on the Mac’s hard drive.

  In general, importing is literally a one-click process. This is the part of iPhoto covered in this chapter.

• Organize. This step is about sorting and categorizing your chaotic jumble of pictures so you can easily find them and arrange them into logical groups. ...