Chapter 2. Importing and Managing Photos

2. Importing and Managing Photos

The first thing to do in iPhoto is import some photos. iPhoto provides a number of ways you can import photos, including the most obvious: from a digital camera. You can also import files that you downloaded from your camera previously, acquired on a CD, scanned in from prints, or received from a photo-processing company that provides digital images along with traditional prints. It's also possible to use a card readera USB device into which you put the memory card from your camera and which presents the contents of your memory card as files on a diskwith the twist that iPhoto recognizes some card readers and can import from them just as though they were cameras. And lastly, you can copy photos that other iPhoto users make available to you on disc or over a network.

In this chapter, we'll look at all the ways you can import pictures into iPhoto and manage them afterward, including such tasks as trashing and recovering photos, making and switching between different iPhoto Library folders, backing up your images to CD or DVD, and learning exactly how iPhoto stores images on your hard disk.

Multitasking While Importing

Although you may not realize this fact, you can work in other parts of iPhoto while it is importing images. Although this is worth keeping in mind, it's not always as much of a help as you might think, since you usually want to work with the images that are being imported.