Introducing iPhoto

Have a digital camera? If so, you may have struggled to keep track of image files with arcane names such as 200214057. With Apple's iPhoto, there's an easy way to store, organize, edit, and even share your photographs. iPhoto even connects directly to many digital cameras , so you can skip loading special software.

Some people feel that film cameras might be replaced by digital cameras altogether. As these clever devices get cheaper, and both image and home-printing quality goes up, it becomes harder and harder to justify the trip to the supermarket to get that roll developed.

Perhaps iPhoto's greatest strength is that it allows you to visually search your entire photo collection without opening and closing folders so you don't have to remember film rolls or dates while looking for the ones you want. Viewing tiny thumbnail images of hundreds of your pictures at a time, demonstrated in Figure 10.2, allows you to scan for the one you want. (If you need to see each image in greater detail, you can also increase the size of this preview.)

Figure 10.2. iPhoto makes it easy to manage a lot of images.

We'll cover iPhoto in detail in Chapter 12, "Using iPhoto."