iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

Keywords

Keywords are descriptive words—like family, vacation, or kids—that you can use to label and categorize your photos, regardless of which album they’re in.

The beauty of keywords in iPhoto is that they’re searchable. Want to comb through all the photos in your library to find every closeup taken of your children during summer vacation? Instead of browsing through multiple photo albums, just perform an iPhoto search for photos containing the keywords kids, vacation, close-up, and summer. You’ll have the results in seconds.

Keywords are also an integral part of iPhoto’s smart albums feature, as described on the previous pages.

Editing Keywords

Apple offers you a few sample entries in the Keywords list to get you rolling: Favorite, Family, Vacation, Kids, and Birthday. But these are intended only as a starting point. You can add as many new keywords as you want—or delete any of Apple’s—to create a meaningful, customized list:

• To add, delete, or rename keywords, choose iPhoto → Preferences. Click the Keywords button to reveal the panel shown in Figure 5-15. Now click Add to produce a new entry called “untitled” in the Keywords list, ready to be edited. Finally, just type in your new keyword name and then press Return or Enter.

• To delete a keyword, select it in the list and then click Remove. As usual in iPhoto, you can select multiple keywords for deletion by Shift-clicking or (for noncontiguous selections) ⌘-clicking them in the list before clicking Remove. (When you remove a keyword ...