Help with iPhoto and EVENTS

Hello. New to an IMac. SO glad I am finally THERE! I have scanned 4-6 photos at a time to get my paper photos digital.

Then I duplicated in IPhoto and renamed. Now that I am trying to put them into the appropriate EVENTS, the photos that were scanned with them move as a group.

If I move one photo to CHRISTMAS, then all on that sheet go to Christmas. For the life of me I can't figure out how to get past these?

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance.

Photos in iPhoto are organized by events, ie the time incorporated into the digital file. Your photos have the wrong time on them because they have the time they were scanned, not when they were actually taken.

You need to edit each scanned photo and use the "batch" or single "Change Time/Date" function in the menu bar to more accurately reflect the photo's true time. That's the first thing you need to understand.

The second thing is the difference between ALBUMS and EVENTS. Events are sorted by time criteria and you can't change that. Albums (which you create in the sidebar of iPhoto) can have photos added to them from any event, and are sorted in any order you like. So, to use your example, let's say you create an album called Christmas Pictures. You can add photos from across all your different christmas pictures to the album, regardless of what event they were originally in.

Both Albums and Events are not extra copies of pictures: they are filtered views of the main library. They just have different criteria for sorting (Events: strictly limited by time; Albums, free form).

Ah, got it.
Thanks Chas_M will give those thoughts a try!

To Good To Be True

Well shoot.
I went in and changed the date/time stamp for the 4 photos I scanned at once to all different dates.

Went to put them in different events and they STILL travel together.
Not sure what I am doing wrong here?
Thought for sure the ADJUST DATE & TIME was the issue.

What else am I missing?

I get that Events and Albums are organization elements.
Is there a way to add my edited and renamed pictures back to File Finder to have "clean" photos to work with.

Man this is frustrating.

Trauthwein said:

Went to put them in different events and they STILL travel together.
Not sure what I am doing wrong here?

Click to expand...

If the times are not significantly different from each other (within a few hours), they are still considered the same "event." But perhaps we're overlooking the obvious: maybe they are all just selected?

Is there a way to add my edited and renamed pictures back to File Finder to have "clean" photos to work with.

Click to expand...

Sure, you can just select a photo and drag it out of iPhoto onto the desktop. This creates a copy.

You could then (if you wanted) delete the one in iPhoto. Then re-import the "copy" as a new "original" by dragging it back in. Once that's done you can throw away the "desktop" copy.

I made sure I had one selected. I moved the years several apart.

Some were black and whites from the 40's others Christmas in the 80's.
No matter what I do, when I move one of the photos to a new event, they all go there.

I guess I'm not understanding what you're trying to do.

As events are by definition groups of pictures defined by when they were taken, you can't move a photo from one event to another. One ALBUM to another, certainly, but that's because albums aren't set by any particular criteria.

You can MERGE events if you like by grabbing an event and dropping it on another event. Is that what you are trying to do?

If not, I'd suggest making an ALBUM and moving individual photos from whatever events you like into it.

Maybe I'm not understanding but if you go into photo view (right under events) you can select individual pictures and move to different events then back in event view they should show under the event you moved them to,

Sorry I am not being clearer (tough to do in email sometimes).

Here is my challenge.

I moved in @ 4,000 photo to my iMac. Of these I had @ 800 pictures scanned by laying down 4-6 photos at a time.

I put the scanned pictures into PICTURES of the FILE FINDER. I moved the 3,200 photos across 47 events with no problem.

The way I got the 800 photos into iPhoto was to DUPLICATE them in iPhoto, rename and crop each one.

I think that is my issue (I think). Now when I try to move the remaining 800 photos to the proper event (one of 47), all the pictures that were scanned on that particular page are moving to the new event.

I went in and change the DATE/TIME stamp on all 5 photos and still they travel together with events.

I no longer have the originals, so getting this unravelled is my only option.

Another stumper for me is that the files in FINDER come off as SCAN 0001, COPY SCAN 0001, COPY 2 0001, etc.

Not sure where to go from here? The DUPLICATE aspect was done IN iPhoto, not FILE FINDER.

Does this help any?

...Desperate,

Thanks for any additional insight.

As a newbee myself, i'm reading these posts to try to figure out how iPhoto works. Just curious, could the problem be that the photos were scanned together, so they are going to remain together? Do photos have to be scanned (ugh) one at a time?

Oh, yes! That's the issue.

If you scanned 4-6 photos at one time, then you only have one image, not 4-6 images. So of course they move together -- they are the same file!

You'll need to open the one image that has 4-6 photos scanned on it and re-crop it and re-save however many times to have one file for each image.

Once that's done, you can drop the individual photos into iPhoto and change their date/time as appropriate. You can rename them, but that name is for iPhoto's purposes only and does not change the original filename. Nor will anything you do in iPhoto have any effect on the files not within its own "vault," so to speak. iPhoto keeps its pictures in the iPhoto Library and does not interact with pictures stored anywhere else by default.

chas_m said:

... you can't move a photo from one event to another...

Click to expand...

But you can!!! I do it all the time.

Sawday said:

But you can!!! I do it all the time.

Click to expand...

Would you mind detailing your procedure for moving an individual photo from one EVENT to another EVENT. As far as I can tell that's not actually possible, but I'm always happy to learn something new.

It's as simple as dragging from one event to another. In this example I've moved two photos to (temporary) individual Events (Screen shot 1), then simply dragged one to another (Screen shot 2). Does this answer the query?

Can you try that again in events that have more than one photo and see if you can do it?

Because when you drag the entire contents of one event into another event, that's called MERGING events and is NOT the same thing.

Like this you mean?

I'm smacking myself in the head for not spotting this earlier.

You and I are not using the same version of iPhoto. You are using an earlier version. I am using the current version. In the current version (I just found out just now!) you must select the "photos" view and then choose "Show Event Titles" under the View menu in order to see more than one event at a time. ONLY THEN can you move photos from one event to another.

Thanks for helping me learn something new!

My fault... I really must update iPhoto and get Lion at the same time. it's on my To Do list!!