iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

Working with Your Photos

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

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. (Pressing your Page Up and Page Down keys work, too. They scroll one screenful at a time.)

  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 full library, especially if you haven’t collapsed the film rolls you’re not using. 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 spot on the scroll bar that corresponds to the location you want in your Library. If you want to jump to the bottom of the 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 all Mac OS X scroll bars—that is, you won’t need the Option key.