Will iphoto work for me?

[Marilynfan]

I am brand new to the mac world and I am having a hard time figuring out if iPhoto is going to work for my purposes. It seems to organzie everything by Events which I guess are based on date the photo was taken. The majority of photos I have are not family pics. I am a Marilyn Monroe fan and I had a folder on my PC with all my Marilyn pics organized in it. If I put them into iPhoto it won't be possible to just browse them in the events and not have them mix in with my family pics. Any suggestions on how I could make use of iPhoto for this? Basically, would I have to organize everything using albums? Do people actually use events to browse their photos?

 

[overanalyzer]

I like the new events feature (it's new to iPhoto '08). You can actually organize photos not only by date (which it does automatically) for events, but however you want. So you can group all your Marilyn photos as an event, if you want. You can still use albums too, including smart albums. So you could also tag all your Marilyn photos with "Marilyn Monroe" or something, and then create a smart album that will automatically show them all. That also makes it easy to set up a screen saver of them, for instance, or sync them with your iPod/iPhone.

 

[Marilynfan]

Thanks for the reply. I guess I am looking at a way to still have my folder (Marilyn Monroe folders) and inside there have the subfolders (Marilyn in particular movies, etc). Sounds like this isn't possible with events so I would have to set this up using albums.

 

[overanalyzer]

I'd do it with tags, personally. I'd tag all of them as Marilyn, then tag them as appropriate with the movie titles or whatever else. That way rather than having to organize them manually by directories, you can sort, group and search them. So you could for instance pull all the photos together where she was in one of a few different movies, or all the ones marked with a certain year or a color of dress, or whatever you decide to tag them based on. Tagging and smart collections are way more flexible than manual directories or albums.

 

[Marilynfan]

Thanks I will give it a try.