Section 5.4. Selecting Photos


5.4. Selecting Photos

To highlight a single picture in preparation for printing, opening, duplicating, or deleting, click the icon once with the mouse.

That much may seem obvious. But many first-time Mac users have no idea how to manipulate more than one icon at a timean essential survival skill.

To highlight multiple photos in preparation for deleting, moving, duplicating, printing, and so on, use one of these techniques:

Figure 5-5. You can highlight several photos simultaneously by dragging a box around them. To do so, start from somewhere outside of the target photos and drag diagonally across them, creating a whitish enclosure rectangle as you go. Any photos touched by this rectangle are selected when you release the mouse.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
The Mini-Photo Effect

Hey, what's the deal? When I double-click a photo to open it for editing, it appears momentarily as a little, three-inch version. It takes three seconds to fill the window so I can get to work. Do I need to send my copy of iPhoto in for servicing ?

No, not exactly.

Today's digital photos are pretty big, especially if you've got one of those cameras that takes giant- sized photos (5 to 13 megapixels, for example).

Now, as it turns out, that's a lot more pixels than even the biggest computer screen has. So the Mac must not only "read" all the photo information off your hard drive, it must then compute a scaled-down version that's exactly the size of your iPhoto window. Naturally, all of this computation takes time.

In previous versions of iPhoto, Apple tried to disguise this moment of computation by first displaying a full-sized but blurry, low-resolution photo, and then filling in the sharpened details a moment later. It drove people absolutely crazy.

The new approachin which you first see a small but clear rendition of the photo with the words "Loading Photo"still doesn't let you begin editing until the full-window computation is complete. What it does do is show you, clearly, which photo you've opened. And if you've opened the wrong one, you don't have to wait any longer; you can click over to a different photo, having wasted no more time than necessary.


  • To select all photos . Select all the pictures in the set you're viewing by pressing -A (the equivalent of the Edit Select All command).

  • To select several photos by dragging . You can drag diagonally to highlight a group of nearby photos, as shown in Figure 5-5. You don't even have to enclose the thumbnails completely; your cursor can touch any part of any icon to highlight it. In fact, if you keep dragging past the edge of the window, iPhoto scrolls the window automatically.


    Tip: If you include a particular thumbnail in your dragged group by mistake, -click it to remove it from the selected cluster.
  • To select consecutive photos . Click the first thumbnail you want to highlight, and then Shift-click the last one. All the files in between are automatically selected, along with the two photos you clicked (Figure 5-6, top). This trick mirrors the way Shift-clicking works in a word processor, the Finder, and many other kinds of programs.

    Figure 5-6. Top: To select a block of photos (as indicated by the faint colored border on each one), click the first one, and then Shift-click the last one. iPhoto selects all the files in between your clicks.
    Bottom: To select nonadjacent photos, -click them. (Or, to remove one of the photos from your selection, -click it.)
  • To select random photos . If you only want to highlight, for example, the first, third, and seventh photos in a window, start by clicking photo icon No. 1. Then -click each of the others. Each thumbnail sprouts a colored border to indicate that you've selected it (Figure 5-6, bottom).

    If you're highlighting a long string of photos and then click one by mistake, you don't have to start over. Instead, just -click it again, and the dark highlighting disappears. (If you do want to start over from the beginning, however, just deselect all selected photos by clicking any empty part of the window.)

    The key trick is especially handy if you want to select almost all the photos in a window. Press -A to select everything in the folder, then -click any unwanted photos to deselect them. You'll save a lot of time and clicking.


Tip: You can also combine the -clicking business with the Shift-clicking trick. For instance, you could click the first photo, then Shift-click the tenth, to highlight the first ten. Next, you could -click photos 2, 5, and 9 to remove them from the selection.

Once you've highlighted multiple photos, you can manipulate them all at once. For example, you can drag them en masse out of the window and onto your desktopa quick way to export them. (Actually, you may want to drag them onto a folder in the Finder to avoid spraying their icons all over your desktop.) Or you can drag them into an album at the left side of the iPhoto window. Just drag any one of the highlighted photos; all other highlighted thumbnails go along for the ride.

In addition, when multiple photos are selected, the commands in the File, Edit, Photos, and Share menusincluding Duplicate, Print, Revert to Original, and Emailapply to all of them simultaneously.




iPhoto 6
iPhoto 6: The Missing Manual
ISBN: 059652725X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 183

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