Section 5.14. The Photo Info Window


5.14. The Photo Info Window

The small Information pane below the Source list displays only the most basic information about your photos: title, date, time, rating, format, and size . For more detailed information, you need the Get Info command. It opens the Photo Info window, where iPhoto displays a surprisingly broad dossier of details about your photo: the make and model of the digital camera used to take it, for example, and even exposure details like the f-stop, shutter speed, and flash settings.

To open the Photo Info window (Figure 5-21), select a thumbnail and then choose Photos Get Info (or press -I). (If more than one photo is selected, you'll get only a bunch of dashes in the info window.)

In addition to the Keywords tab described above, the Photo Info window contains Photo and Exposure tabs. The Photo panel contains information about the image file itselfwhen it was originally created, when it was first imported, and when it was last modified. If the image was shot with a digital camera (as opposed to being scanned or imported from disk), the make and model of the camera appear at the bottom of the window (see Figure 5-21).


Tip: Comparing the details on the Exposure panel with the advice in Chapters 2 and 3 can be eye- opening. For example, if you put your camera into its automatic mode and snap a few pictures, you can find outand learn fromthe shutter and lighting settings the camera used.
Figure 5-21. The Photo Info window reports details about your photos by reading the EXIF tags that your camera secretly embeds in your files.
Left: On the Exposure panel, you can tell at a glance that this photo was shot with a flash, at a shutter speed of 1/160, and with an f-stop setting of 4.2. Tracking this information can be useful in determining which settings on your camera produce the best-quality digital photos in a certain set of conditions.
Right: iPhoto uses the Original Date (or lacking that, Modified date) information to sort your photos in the Photo Library and place them in their respective year albums.

How on earth does iPhoto know so much about how your photos were taken? Most digital cameras embed a wealth of image, camera, lens, and exposure information in the photo files they create, using a standard data format called EXIF (Exchangeable Image Format). With that in mind, iPhoto automatically scans photos for EXIF data as it imports them.


Note: Some cameras do a better job than others at embedding EXIF data in photo files. iPhoto can extract this information only if it's been properly stored by the camera when the digital photo is created. Of course, most (if not all) of this information is missing altogether if your photos didn't come from a digital camera (if they were scanned in, for example).



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

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