Help with view pictures?

I just got the new MacBook, and I'm wondering if there is any way to make iPhoto my default photo viewer instead of the viewer when I open photos from my "Pictures" file. Also, is there any way to, well, I guess hyperlinke iPhoto and the Pictures file so that when I add a file or album to one it's also added to the other? I'm new to Mac and still trying to figure this all out. I'm actually a photographer, so I really need to learn all this stuff to organize everything. Any suggestions as to what I can do or what might help would be hugely helpful. One of my biggest issues is actually just that when I open the viewer, I cant scroll through photos like I can in iPhoto. It won't let me scroll thorugh photos for some reason. I know I can use the cover flow view, but it doesn;t show me the photos big enough. Thanks in advance for any help you can give me!

You can get photos to open up in iPhoto by changing the default program.

Pick a filetype, say a JPEG file, and right click on it and select Get info

One of the options will be Open with, chose another app, apart from preview and select change all, now all JPEG files will open up in that program.

Before you do that, I would give Picasa from google a try, its a better image browser than iPhoto in my opinion

Picasa for Mac: Free download from Google

if you want a simple viewer that will let you scroll through photos, try Xee

from what i hear though, if you use iphoto, you'll want to do everything in iphoto lest you mess up your library. i'm one of the hadful of people who don't even deal with iphoto. i use finder and xee and a couple editing apps, and that's pretty much it - old school.

Yeah, I would rather not use iPhoto. I have no problems using the viewer, except that I can't use the three finger command to scroll through photos, and when I hit the next button it doesn't work. Is that something that can be changed?

in Xee, you just need to use < and > (not the arrows, but the actual keys) to scroll. and there are a lot of other easy shortcuts and a few minimal editing tools (crop and rotate, etc).

I'm trying to go through the viewer, and when I double click on a photo and it opens, it's the only photo in the sidebar. Yet when I go to the settings for the trackpad, it talks about the three finger navigation, and the animation of it shows someone scrolling through photos in the viewer (preview) program, and there is more than one photo open in the side bar. Sorry to be a pain, thank you for all your help, I'm just wondering what might be going on. If I could just get that one thing fixed, I would be totally satisfied.

what app are you using?

edit: nm, i get it, just preview. it only opens the image you tell it to open.

really, go tot he link i provided and download Xee, give it a shot, if you liked windows picture manager (the standard viewer), you'll like Xee.

Does it work along with the pictures file? or do I have to upload all my photos to that program? I didn't even know there were downloadable programs like that out there.

Preview can open multiple files together. Select the first file, shift click to add others to your selection, then right click and open in preview.
This will give you a preview pane with a side drawer showing thumbnails.

tenpointnine said:

Preview can open multiple files together. Select the first file, shift click to add others to your selection, then right click and open in preview.
This will give you a preview pane with a side drawer showing thumbnails.

Click to expand...

When I do this it opens each picture in its own preview window. Anyway to do it like in windows, where you preview one photo, and press next, and then it goes to the next photo?

bjratchf said:

When I do this it opens each picture in its own preview window. Anyway to do it like in windows, where you preview one photo, and press next, and then it goes to the next photo?

Click to expand...

If you want to see all that is in one folder just drag the folder down to the Dock and drop it on the "Preview" icon.. If you just want to see part of the files in a folder, Select the ones you want by clicking on the first photo then hold Shift and click on the last one you want, then drag all those and drop on "Preview" down on the dock. You can also unselect some of the photos in the Finder list by " command+click". Either way the photos will show up on the sidebar of Preview and you can the scroll through them with the "Next" or "Previous" buttons.