How up to date is you iPhoto library?
iPhoto enables you to catalog your photos with Titles, Comments, Ratings and Keywords, but how many of us keep those up to date? I’d be surprised if I’m the only one.
I haven’t added any of that info to my photos for most of this year.
I have 1792 photos in iPhoto. 807 have no title, 780 have no keywords and 1627 have no rating.
How could iPhoto make it easier to input that information?
There’s a maxim of Time Management that says “Only handle a piece of paper once”
When iPhoto loads your pics from the camera, you can batch name and comment them, but if you are like me, there’s usually a mix of photos, so that feature goes unused.
So I have to go in after the import and enter that info. Effectively, double handling. And - obviously - I don’t get around to it, even though most times I’m only uploading 10 to 20 photos. It just feels like the process is done, why go do more work?
If iPhoto enabled me to enter that info during the import (as an option of course) for each photo, there’s much greater likelihood of me doing it. So for each photo, I would be prompted for Title, Comments, Rating and Keywords during the import process. To make life a little easier, it would retain the info from the previous photo and add an incremented number to the title.
While I’m talking iPhoto, other features I want are:
- Support for scanners!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So I can easily scan in my old hardcopy photos
- Core Image effects directly accessible from the Photo Editing window
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Scanner support already exists, just not in iPhoto itself. Look to Image Capture instead.
Thanks Ben. I didn’t know about that (I’d been using my scanner’s software) - and the networking of the scanner is really cool. I’m surprised some of those settings aren’t in System Preferences.
But unfortunately it still doesn’t save into iPhoto.
I’m with you here. I’d love to catalog all my photos with more descriptions or at least a title, but having to open each one up in the fashion required is a bit of a pain.
I truly prefer Picasa on Windows to iPhoto. I wish Google would release Picasa for Mac!
After reading “iLife: The Missing Manual” I’ve settled on using “Film Rolls” for my organising structure.
I try to tag - sorry - keyword all photos that include ‘me’ so I can have a Smart Album of self-portraits (for example). Apart from that I just use rolls because you can shuffle photos between rolls (or make new ones), give the roll a title and a timestamp, and it means that most batches you import are already in an ideal organisational unit. Just turn on the option to show film rolls in your Library.
Film rolls work. I also make albums into groupings I use most often… i.e. vacations, scenic, gand daughter, etc.
One thing I don’t like is that when you put in a name for the photo, it actually renames it. this is a problem for me, because I share a digital camera with my parents, and sometimes we don’t delete photos after downloading them. Thus, if I rename photos, they will get downloaded again with the new photos, because iPhoto doesn’t recognize them as the same ones.