Digital Pictures

How do you organize your digital photos? I have only tried using iPhoto and it seems really inefficient because you cannot organize them in folders better so if you want to find a certain photo to put on CD or what not it is really hard. But without importing photos into iPhoto you cannot have a good looking slideshow.

Does anyone know of a good way of organizing? I spent a bunch of time creating folders for all my categories and then realized that as soon as I drag them into iPhoto it creates all new files... doubling the disk space.

Without buying a third party program, is there any way to store pictures on a Mac in a good way?

You can download iPhoto Diet from MacUpdate.com to help get rid of the duplicate files etc. It's a very handy program.

People don't seem to realize that iPhoto is drag and drop capable. You don't need to go looking through your folders to find a photo. Search for it in iPhoto, select it (or them) and just drag them to a burn folder.

I use iPhoto a lot and really like it, I have seen plenty of programs of its ilk but iPhoto from me gets a thumbs up (and never had any issues with it).

What I do (I have OS X 10.4) is to create a whole load of new keywords (iPhoto -> Preferences...) and then I select the photos I want to assign a certain keyword to, do command + i or Photo -> Get Info... from the menu bar and select the Keywords tab.

Then you can assign a keyword or keywords to the selected images.

That way I can then click the 'key' in the lower left hand part of iPhoto, select the keywords I want to include and construct a search that shows only pictures of that keyword.

Likewise this works in Spotlight.

This means I can quickly find pictures that are e.g.: from sussex, then sunsets, and then architecture. It may pull out photos of Bodiam Castle, E.Sussex last week at Sunset.

It's a little bit of organisation that goes a very long way.

Vicky

iPhoto helper

My mac group's iPhoto SIG uses and recommends iPhoto Buddy. When you get more than a thousand photos even a new mac will slow down as iPhoto looks at the entire library of photos whenever it is opened. iPhoto buddy is freeware (Donation ware).

To quote from their website (http://nofences.net/iphotoBuddy/):
"iPhoto Buddy is a small utility that allows you to use more than one photo Library with Apple's iPhoto" ... "iMovie and iDVD. The advantages of splitting your One Huge Photo Library into multiple, smaller ones include improved iPhoto performance..."

To set this program up, after installing, files are transferred and finally deleted from iPhoto.

Then iPhoto Buddy, when opened lets you look at each set of photos as a independent library (It still runs inside of iPhoto, so all features of iPhoto are present except the slowdown due to thousands of your pictures). This app requires Mac "OS X 10.2.4 or later, iPhoto 2 or later, and (optionally) iMovie 3 and/or iDVD 3 or later. iPhoto Buddy is fully compatible with iLife '04 and iLife '05."

I hope this helps.

Thanks lil and lazvlizard, good to know

Quite OK :flower:

I know it's quite a paradigm shift to organise your files on metadata as opposed to sub-directories and so forth; and I see many 10.4 users still organising this way -- heck even I do still in some ways!

However, since almost forcing myself to really give metadata a chance, it really has improved matters organising my files of all types with spotlight, smart folders and so forth. So I truly recommend it!

Vicky