iPhoto

When you import videos to iPhoto from, say, an iPhone, the videos get dumped in with all the snapshots you've taken. Thankfully, there is an easy way to separate out the videos by using a Smart Album.… Read more

If you are overwhelmed by the sprawling features of Photoshop or another high-powered editing application, iPhoto offers simple yet effective editing tools for amateur photographers. In fact, performing edits in iPhoto can be as simple as pressing a single button. Don't be afraid to get in there and experiment; iPhoto editing is nondestructive, meaning that you can always return a photo to its original, unedited state.… Read more

With Facebook and Twitter and photo-sharing sites like Flickr and Picasa, it's not as common to e-mail photos as it was a few years ago. One of the many ways these online services are convenient for sharing photos is they automatically resize them. Show of hands: how many times have you been e-mailed a photo that was so gigantic that you needed to scroll up and down, left and right to make sense of it? And with the megapixel count of today's cameras, we all have the capacity to e-mail enormously oversize images. If there is a book of e-mail decorum, resizing a photo before e-mailing it should be one of the first chapters. And if you are uploading a photo rather than e-mailing it, reducing the size of your images can greatly speed up the upload time.

For Mac users, iPhoto makes it easy to resize a photo. Here's how:… Read more

iPhoto '11 presents two ways to view your library: by thumbnails of every photo or by events. A useful organizational tool, an event groups photos taken during a certain time period. Each event is viewed as a thumbnail, and when you mouse over that thumbnail, you can skim through the photos it contains. Viewing by events in iPhoto makes it easier to scroll through your photos, particularly when your library contains thousands upon thousands of photos. iPhoto creates events as you import photos, and you can set parameters on how it goes about doing so.… Read more

If you have a GPS-enabled camera or pretty much any recent smartphone, using iPhoto Places is seamless. iPhoto will pull in the GPS information when you import photos to your iPhoto library. But for older cameras without GPS, you can assign a place to photos and events in iPhoto.

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Perhaps you shun social media and photo-sharing sites. For you, e-mail is the simplest and most direct way of sharing photos. That's fine. I'm sure you have your reasons. I'm not here to sell you on Facebook or Flickr. If you are on a Mac and use iPhoto, however, I have a suggestion. Link your preferred e-mail account with iPhoto, which lets you e-mail photos directly from iPhoto. No more will you need to fire up your e-mail client and hunt for the attachment (hopefully, one that you've already resized) and wait for it to be attached.

Upon first glance, you may think you need a MobileMe account to e-mail directly from iPhoto. Not true. You can add any e-mail account to iPhoto. It's easy. Here's how:… Read more

Flagging photos in iPhoto is a convenient way to mark photos you want to upload, print, or return to later to edit. Flagging is quicker and easier than creating an album and dragging photos into it to upload or edit. If you recently upgraded from iPhoto '09 to iPhoto '11, however, you may have noticed a slight change to the way photo flagging works. In iPhoto '09, you could simply click on the gray flag in the upper-left corner of a photo you were viewing to flag it. (The gray flag turns orange to confirm your command.) Now, in iPhoto '11, those gray flags are visible only when viewing the top-level, thumbnail view of photos (which doesn't make any sense, since it's usually difficult to ascertain whether a photo is flag-worthy until you see a larger shot of it).… Read more

Photo events that appear in iTunes when syncing your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch may not show up the way you ultimately wish them to. This hint from Mac OS X Hints explains how you can use iPhoto to change the sort order of your events and have them show up properly in iTunes when you sync your iOS devices.

To change the order of events as they appear in iTunes, you must first change the order of your events in iPhoto. Open iPhoto and choose Events from the sidebar (under Library at the top of the list). From this … Read more

With an update released today, Apple's photo applications now can handle raw images from Nikon's new mainstream SLR and some new high-end compact cameras.

The Digital Camera Raw Compatibility Update 3.7 means iPhoto, Aperture, and Mac OS X can handle the unprocessed images from Nikon's D5100, Fujifilm's FinePix X100, Olympus' E-PL2 and XZ-1, and Samsung's GX-1S. For those who don't install the update, Apple rolls the support into later versions of Mac OS X.

Raw photos enable more flexibility for editing, for example letting photographers adjust exposure and white balance. The flexibility comes … Read more