6.19. Reverting to the Original iPhoto includes built-in protection against overzealous editinga feature that can save you much grief . If you end up cropping a photo too much, cranking up the brightness of a picture until it seems washed out, or accidentally turning someone's lips black with the Red-Eye tool, you can undo all your edits at once with the Revert to Original command. Revert to Original strips away every change you've ever made since the picture arrived from the camera. It leaves you with your original, unedited photo. The secret of the Revert to Original command: Whenever you use any editing tools, iPhotowithout prompting and without informing youinstantly makes a duplicate of your original file. With an original version safely tucked away, iPhoto lets you go wild on the copy. Consequently, you can remain secure in the knowledge that in a pinch , iPhoto can always restore an image to the state it was in when you first imported it.
Note: The unedited originals are stored in an Originals folder inside your Home  Pictures iPhoto Library folder. The edited versions appear in a folder called Modified. (The Modified folder doesnt exist until you edit at least one photo.)
To restore an original photo, undoing all cropping, rotation, brightness adjustments, and so on, select a thumbnail of an edited photo or open the photo in Edit mode. Then choose Photos Revert to Original, or Control-click (or right-click) a photo and choose the command from the shortcut menu. Now iPhoto swaps in the original version of the photoand youre back where you started. As noted earlier, iPhoto does its automatic backup trick whenever you edit your pictures (a) within iPhoto or (b) using a program that you've set up to open when you double-click a picture. It does not make a backup when you drag a thumbnail onto the icon of another program. In that event, the Revert to Original command will be dimmed when you select the edited photo. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
In iPhoto, Less is More | | I just finished editing a batch of photos, cropping each picture to a much smaller size. But now my iPhoto Library folder is taking up more space on my hard drive! How can making the photos smaller increase the size of my photo collection? Shouldn't throwing away all those pixels have the opposite effectshrinking things down? Your cropped photos do, in fact, take up much less space than they previously did. Remember, though, that iPhoto doesn't let you monkey with your photos without first stashing away a copy of each original photo, in case you ever want to use the Revert to Original command to restore a photo to its original condition. So each time you crop a picture (or do any other editing) for the first time, you're actually creating a new, full-size file on your hard drive, as iPhoto stores both the original and the edited versions of the photo. Therefore, the more photos you edit in iPhoto, the more hard drive space your photo collection will occupy. Incidentally, it's worth noting that iPhoto may be a bit overzealous when it comes to making backups of your originals. The simple act of rotating a photo, for example, creates a backup (which, considering how easy it is to re-rotate it, you might not consider strictly necessary). If you've set up iPhoto to open a double-clicked photo in another program like Photoshop, iPhoto creates a backup copy even if you don't end up changing it in that external program. If this library-that-ate-Cleveland effect bothers you, you might investigate the free program iPhoto Diet (available from the "Missing CD" page of www.missingmanuals.com, for example). One of its options offers to delete the backups of photos that have simply been rotated . Another option deletes perfect duplicates that iPhoto created when you opened those photos in another program without editing them. There's even an option to delete all backupsa drastic measure for people who believe that their photos will never be better than they are right now. |
Bottom line: If you want the warmth and security of Revert to Original at your disposal, don't edit your pictures behind iPhoto's back. Follow the guidelines in the previous two paragraphs so that iPhoto is always aware of when and how you're editing your pictures.  |
