Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Tiger 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 all these problems is iPhoto, a simple and uncluttered program designed to organize, edit, and distribute digital photos without nightmarish hassles. Here's the executive summary of iPhoto 5.

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.

2. Turn on the camera.

   iPhoto detects that there are new photos available for download. The entire screen changes to show you a "Ready to import" message, and your camera's icon appears in the Source list at the left side.

3. If you like, type in a roll name and description for the pictures you're about to import.

   Each time you import a new set of photos into iPhoto—whether from your hard drive, a camera, or a memory card—that batch of imported photos is called a film roll.

   Typing in a name for each new batch as you import ...