Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition

iPhoto

Once you’re hooked on using a digital camera, your free, filmless photos pile up quickly. Before you know it, you have 6,000 pictures of your kid playing soccer. Just organizing and keeping track of all these photos is enough to drive you insane.

Apple’s answer to such problems was iPhoto, a simple and uncluttered program designed to organize, edit, and distribute digital photos without the nightmarish hassles. Here’s the executive summary.

Importing Pictures

Plugging a USB camera into your Mac is the easiest way to transfer pictures into iPhoto. The whole process practically happens by itself.

1. With your camera turned off, connect it to your Mac using the USB cable that came with it.

   iPhoto opens automatically as soon as you switch on the camera (unless you’ve changed the factory settings in Image Capture).

Note

If this is the first time you’ve ever run iPhoto, it asks if you always want it to run when you plug in the camera. If you value your time, say yes.

1. Turn on the camera.

   iPhoto detects that there are new photos available for download.

2. Click the Import button at the bottom of the screen.

   iPhoto swings into action, copying each photo from your camera to your hard drive. (If you turned on “Erase camera contents after transfer,” you’ll see a final “Are you sure...?” dialog box, affording you one last chance to back out of that decision.)

   The program also creates a thumbnail of each picture—a tiny, low-resolution version of each photo that appears, like a slide on a slide sorter. ...