iPhoto: The Missing Manual

Chapter 3. Five Ways to Flag and Find Photos

The more you get into digital photography, the more pictures you’ll 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 is equally seething with search mechanisms. You can find pictures by the text associated with 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’s flagging feature to find, and later round up, any photos you like.

This chapter covers all five methods and gives you strategic suggestions on how you might use them together.

Note

You can easily track down photos by tagging them with Faces and Places info, too. Those features are covered in Chapter 4.

Flagging Photos

Here’s a simple, sweet iPhoto feature: 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, flag each shot you want. Later, you can round up all the images you flagged so you can drag them all into a new album. Another ...