persuade me to use iPhoto, please.

[OrangeCuse44]

Coming from a PC my entire life back in December i have always used a tree-like way of organizing things, specifically my photos. I would have Digital Pics->Cuse->Senior Year and so on for all different Events (I assume the Events function will suit me nicely). I'm just having trouble sacrificing my organization methods to use iPhoto. Why should I switch?

 

[Nugget]

For me it was the realization that my life was not a tidy, tree-like thing which could be neatly organized into separate buckets like that. Embracing iPhoto means being able to, in less than a dozen keystrokes, see every picture I've ever taken that has both my girlfriend and my mom in it.

Trying to enforce some rigid hierarchy on your photos makes that sort of 90 degree photo browsing and searching completely impractical.

What's a photo "about"? Is it just one thing? Is the content of a photo inexorably tied to just one thing? Is this photo a picture of "Jen's Graduation" or is it a photo of "Jen when she had short hair" or is it a photo of "Summertime, outdoors, when I lived in Indiana"? The reality is that the photo is all three things and many more.

The direction Apple appears to be headed with iPhoto, much like they've already done to our music in iTunes, is to break loose from the artificial order we try to impose and provide a more organic method of interacting with our photos that ultimately leads to a much more involving experience.

 

[GoCubsGo]

If you need to be persuaded to use an application then perhaps you don't really need it at all. Why use iPhoto? In a word, workflow.

 

[hdsalinas]

I am kind of the same boat...

I used to organize my pictures something like this

Pictures/year/date event/pictures

Therefore I could locate events by year and description. I have about 7 years now of images and I am hesistant to let go and let iphoto take care of it for one main reason, future proof.

The way I have it set I can see the date a set of pictures were taken by looking at the name of the containing folder. In the past (pc days) I have had issues where the date data in a picture gets over writen when backing it up to a CD.

Iphoto is pretty good at reading this kind of data but what If i want to open a back up dvd of iphoto on a windows PC, will I be able to do it?

Well got to go, need to get ready for hurricane felix that is about to hit here in Honduras

 

[OrangeCuse44]

So in order to take full advantage of iPhoto's organization, do I have to go through every single picture and label it in some way?

 

[odinsride]

For me it was the realization that my life was not a tidy, tree-like thing which could be neatly organized into separate buckets like that. Embracing iPhoto means being able to, in less than a dozen keystrokes, see every picture I've ever taken that has both my girlfriend and my mom in it.

Trying to enforce some rigid hierarchy on your photos makes that sort of 90 degree photo browsing and searching completely impractical.

What's a photo "about"? Is it just one thing? Is the content of a photo inexorably tied to just one thing? Is this photo a picture of "Jen's Graduation" or is it a photo of "Jen when she had short hair" or is it a photo of "Summertime, outdoors, when I lived in Indiana"? The reality is that the photo is all three things and many more.

The direction Apple appears to be headed with iPhoto, much like they've already done to our music in iTunes, is to break loose from the artificial order we try to impose and provide a more organic method of interacting with our photos that ultimately leads to a much more involving experience.

QFE..This post is brilliant

 

[wwooden]

I never even go through the finder to get a picture, I just open up iPhoto. I have 5000 pictures and it doesn't take me more than 5-10 seconds to find a particular picture, I'm sure that is a lot fast than trying to find it through folders. I love scrolling through all my pictures at once.

 

[0098386]

Nugget, that was fantastic. Well done!

It's true though. I just plug in my memory card, press import and let it organise itself with them new events (the best addition to anything ever). I'd like a method to automatically run that Magic Enhance thingy on a group of pictures. And for iTunes to sync Events as well as photo albums to my iPod.

I've got so many tags now- individual friend names, season, colour theme. Cannot fault it.

 

[OrangeCuse44]

Is there a good method to use for tagging photos? Something that wouldnt take a lifetime and also effective? What kind of tags do you guys use?

 

[lawnornament]

iphoto archives

I have an external HD where I now store my old photos in iPhoto Albums of around 2000 pictures each.
By holding down the option key when opening iPhoto, I can choose which library to load for that session.

When browsing your photos by thumbnail, only those prestored thumbnails are referenced off of the external drive.
This way I can search for photos on the external drive quickly and visually without requiring the computer to reference the base files.
The downside is that if you edit a photo, crop it, color correct it, you won't see the changes until you update all of the thumbnails together.
So I save copies to independent project files if I am changing images.

 

[odinsride]

Is there a good method to use for tagging photos? Something that wouldnt take a lifetime and also effective? What kind of tags do you guys use?

What I did was typed up a document with "tagging standards" for myself. Basically just specifying exactly which tags I will use so I don't end up with a mess of different tags that mean the same thing.

Whenever I import pictures to my iPhoto library I just look at them in thumbnail mode, manually select the ones that go together, and do a batch change to add a particular tag to the description field for those images.

I don't know if there is a better way to do it, that's just how I've been doing it.