iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

Rate Your Photos

iPhoto offers a great way to categorize your pictures: by how great they are! You can assign each picture a rating of 1 to 5 stars, then use the ratings to sort your Photo Library, or gather only the cream of the crop into a slideshow, smart album, or photo book.

Here are the ways you can rate your digital masterpieces:

• Select a photo (or several) and choose Photos → My Rating; from the submenu, choose from 1 through 5 stars. You can even do this while you’re editing a single photo.

  Tip

  If the top of the screen is just too far away, you can also Control-click any one of the selected thumbnails (or, in Edit mode, anywhere on the photo) and choose the My Rating command from the shortcut menu. Its submenu is exactly the same as what you’d find in the Photos → My Rating command.

• If you’re not a mousy sort of person, you can perform the same stunt entirely from the keyboard. Press ⌘-1 for one star, ⌘-2 for two stars, and so on. Press ⌘-0 to strip away any existing ratings.

• During a slideshow, twitch the mouse to bring up the onscreen control bar. In the bar, click the row of dots to turn them into rating stars (click the third dot to give the current photo 3 stars, for example). Or just press the number keys on the keyboard to bestow that number of stars as the slides go by.

• To remove a rating, select the photo and choose Photos → My Ratings → None. You’re saying, in effect, “This photo has not yet been rated.” Keyboard shortcut: ⌘-0.

Tip

Once you’ve applied your star ratings, ...