Create Photo Albums

iPhoto organizes your photos by albums, which you can use to organize your pictures. To create an album, click the + button near the bottom left of the iPhoto window. Enter a name for the album in the New Album dialog, and then click OK. This adds the album to the photo library list. Here’s one called Mountain pictures:

How to... Import Photos from Your Camera with Image Capture

Mac OS X includes a program called Image Capture that gives you a different way to import photos from your digital camera. Plug in your digital camera and open Image Capture by double-clicking its icon in the Applications folder. What's most interesting about using Image Capture is that you can choose to download some or all of your camera's photos, whereas iPhoto downloads all of them.

To do this, click the Download Some button; this displays all your photos in thumbnails. Select the ones you want to download by clicking one photo and then holding down the z key and clicking others, or by clicking and dragging around a group of photos. Select a location from the Download Folder pop-up menu, and then click Download.

Image Capture can also carry out automatic tasks after downloading photos, making it a more powerful tool for people who take a lot of pictures. See the program's online help for more information.

Photo albums are a way of organizing your pictures. You can add as many pictures as you want to a photo album by dragging pictures from your photo library onto the album name.

After you have added pictures to your photo album, click its name in the photo library list to view its contents.

If you click one of your pictures to select it, you’ll see some information display below the photo library list. You can change the title and date of the picture; the other information, such as the Size and the Bytes, depend on the actual resolution and size of the picture file.

You can make as many albums as you want, and you can add the same photos to several albums; the original photos remain in your Photo Library and the albums only contain links to them. However, if you edit any of your photos, the edited versions display in all your albums.

If you want to delete an album, just select it and press the DELETE key on your keyboard. An alert will ask you to confirm the deletion.

Tip

Another way to view your photos is by film roll. iPhoto considers that each import you make is a film roll, and records the date and number of photos each film roll contains. To view photos like this, select View | Film Rolls. Each film roll displays with a disclosure triangle that you can click to view or hide its contents, and shows the roll number, the date, and the number of photos it contains.