iPhoto Habits

inactionman · May 7, 2004 10:37PM

I got back from vacation a few weeks ago and when I connected my iPod to transfer the pictures into iPhoto I realized that I haven't used in a long time. Aside from transferring new pictures I rarely use it all. When iPhoto 4 was first released I thought I was going to go through my entire library and assign keywords and ratings to all my pictures but I'm barely a sixth of the way through it.

So, the point of this thread is to find out what other AIers iPhoto habits are. Have you rated a good portion of your library? Assigned keywords? Made oodles of Smart Albums? Do you use the print services or book thingy? Or are lazy like me?

I thought I'd waste time tagging stuff in iPhoto the way I do in iTunes but alas, I have not.

chrisg · May 8, 2004 11:55AM

Depends, I find it is much easier to assign those types of things the second I import new photos, but I have been going back now and again through my library of 1700 adding things here and there mostly peoples names and rating a few that I really like.

buonrotto · May 8, 2004 12:22PM

I have this set up going:

1. I import the pictures and back them up to CD immediately.

2. I organize my library into rolls. I group pictures into a roll by the event it was taken for, and name the roll for that event. You can drag pictures from one roll to another in iPhoto 4, so I sometimes have occasion to split up or collect pictures into distinct subject groups this way rather than creating albums for this.

3. I batch change the picture titles in a roll to the event/subject, e.g., "Dog Show," or "London Vacation," and simply number the pictures per the check box in the batch change dialog.

4. I show ratings and titles in the iPhoto organizer view along with the rolls of course.

5. I click on a roll to highlight the entire set of pictures in it and play a slide show. When I set up the slide show, I usually associate it with some iTunes playlist (not important but "when in Rome"). I do not randomize the picture order, I don't have it repeat through the slideshow, and I have the slideshow controls visible. I just watch the slideshow and set a rating to each picture as it goes long until it's done. BTW, use the number keys 1-5 to set the rating instead of mousing it. I find this way the most convenient since you can't just click on the rating under the picture while in organize view, which is what I would like to do sometimes, especially when I go back and edit pictures.

I eventually go back and see about improving the picture quality either with iPhoto or PixelNhance usually (yes, I still use orphaned software) at my own pace. While I liked the idea of keyword assignment, I just never had the energy to go through all that, set up good keywords, etc. If someone has a better means of getting through that process, please share because I'd like to use them more to my advantage.

But as of now, to create a .Mac picture album online or to create a book or list of prints for myself, I just create a smart album that has two simple criteria: title and rating. The best pictures (rating of 4-5 stars) of a given event (title name) are put in, if I go back and improve an image and its rating (I right click for a lot of options in iPhoto), it gets tossed in the album automatically.

messiahtosh · May 8, 2004 12:25PM

I've made a few books and scanned in and rated many pictures. I should do more with it though, it's my most unused iApp, even less than iDVD.

sonofsylvanus · May 8, 2004 1:07PM

Out of the iApps, I don't use iCal, iMovie or iDVD (don't have GarageBand) AT ALL. They aren't even in my Dock. I use iPhoto maybe once a month.

I would love to use all these apps more but I don't have a digital camera/camcorder. Was on the brink of getting a camera at Easter, but I got some RAM instead. (That's a point... I've got 2x 256MB to sell if anyone is interested). The only photos I have are from a photo CD that my friend from our trip to Malawi (South Eastern Africa)

iTunes uptime on the other hand = PowerBook uptime. Its playing at least 4 hours a day (been doing a lot of sitting at the computer revising recently). Maybe 5/6hrs including iPod

buonrotto · May 8, 2004 2:45PM

I use iPhoto all the time, but I'm something of a shutterbug.

It's important to handle some of this stuff right away when you import the pictures because otherwise it's something of a burden to do later. iPhoto is more akin to iMovie and GarageBand in that, despite its use as an organizing tool like iTunes, it's really part of a creation workflow. iTunes is sort of exceptional in that most of its content is provided, you just organize it. The rest of the iLife suite is for content creation and while iPhoto doesn't create the content, it's structured such that it aids people who create their own stuff. If iPhoto somehow handled stuff like downloaded images, desktop pictures, etc, with less hassle to import it rather than having to download them, transfer them and then delete the originals, more people would use it.

The little almost undocumented changes in iPhoto 4 are very worthy of $50 for me. I'm also in the process of scanning a huge number of old film rolls from my stay in Europe about 7 years ago now. My biggest request for iPhoto is to pull in Image Capture's ability to use TWAIN compliant scanner drivers to import photos directly. Image Capture is another app that's very nice and most people won't take advantage of. Still, this thread reminded me of a few more requests for iPhoto that I'm going to make right now.

scott · May 8, 2004 8:25PM

I still don't like iPhoto. It doesn't do what i want. Mostly I want to print photos efficiently on a page to size that I want so I can later cut them out. Not complicated but iPhoto is still too locked into its "Album" work flow to do what I want.

buonrotto · May 10, 2004 9:20AM

I thought iPhoto could do layouts like this? However, I hear they don't realy squeeze images on the page too much, lots of white space.

Portraits and Prints sounds more up your alley.

scott · May 10, 2004 1:35PM

You know I think I just found it. From "Organize" I can select the ones I want to print. Hit "print" and then from the print dialog you can choose what to print. I was looking for a layout that would do 4x6 layouts.

mmmpie · May 10, 2004 9:19PM

I use iPhoto to manage all of my incoming paper work. Bills etc. I have albums to represent paid and unpaid, plus Ive got copies off everything I sent away for my Visa.

I decided that I needed some sort of paperless solution, just my Visa paperwork is a huge pile. I was just scanning stuff in, and putting it in a folder. The reason I changed to iPhoto is because I can print an image full page, while every other program wants you to put the image into a margin, so I would have to scale the image and then position it so that its margins overlapped the documents margins. iPhoto is a one click solution for printing.

I have issues because my canon scanner ( which is fine for this sort of stuff ) uses craptacular proprietary software. No TWAIN drivers

I would also like some scanning software that is designed for scanning black and white text. It should scan at high res colour, but convert it to 1 bit. Otherwise you end up with fuzzy print from the grayscale edges of text.

buonrotto · May 10, 2004 10:21PM

That's an interesting use for iPhoto. I have everything online with regard to me banking and I print to PDF all the time instead of this.

Quote:

Originally posted by mmmpie

I would also like some scanning software that is designed for scanning black and white text. It should scan at high res colour, but convert it to 1 bit. Otherwise you end up with fuzzy print from the grayscale edges of text.

You mean OCR software, that is, software that can recognize text and convert scanned text into actual fonts and stuff? Working Papers seems to get decent reviews.

reg · May 11, 2004 12:39PM

I use iPhoto several times a week. We have kids that are in several activities and we are constantly taking pictures and/or movies. I don't rate the pictures but I do organize them into several albums. One of those albums is for my desktop pictures. It is great to have the pictures ramdonly rotating every 5 minutes, any faster and you might miss one while working. I usually will put comments on photos because you can never remember everything later. As for printing, we take what we want to photoshop and make what ever adjustments we want and print to an Epson Photo 2200.

reg

mmmpie · May 11, 2004 1:38PM

Quote:

Originally posted by BuonRotto

You mean OCR software, that is, software that can recognize text and convert scanned text into actual fonts and stuff? Working Papers seems to get decent reviews.

No. I dont need to access the information digitally, I just want a copy of it so I dont have to keep a huge pile of paper around. The problem is that the paper work is black and white . When you scan you can use b+w, but that sucks because you get lots of noise, dust etc, just like in a photocopy. So it is better to scan in grayscale. Then all the dust and noise is gray, so it is easy to get rid of. However, you still have anti aliased text. I havent found any easy way of taking a grayscale scan and processing it to make nice clean b+w text. I can photoshop it, but it is a lot of work ( for me ). ATM I only process scans that Im about to print.

inactionman · May 11, 2004 10:33PM

I've gone through a labeled some of the more momentous albums like vacations and weekends at the cottage and it is actually spurring me on to name the less consequential events, like my dog attacking the sprinkler, only because seeing some pictures nicely labeled Vancouver makes the ones labeled IMG_1897 really irritating. So once I got the ball rolling....

Good old Batch Change....

So I guess I'll get around to assigning keywords to everything but that really is a monumental pain in the ass.

I'd say the effort BuonRotto has put in is well worth it. iPhoto is open most of the time now.

But Apple really has to do something about assigning keywords, it just isn't fun at all.

buonrotto · May 11, 2004 10:48PM

Don't forget about the comments field either. If you export the images as a web page, you can use the comments as captions for each photo in the generated layout. Actually, the web export and e-mail options could inform the .Mac Homepage layouts a bit more. It would be nice to set the dimensions of the exported images and use the comments in Apple's Homepage layouts too.

Anyway, it' doesn't take a lot of effort if you do it when you import the images. Batch change is a very nice feature to have. It's just hard to get around to it later.

reg · May 11, 2004 10:49PM

I don't know of any B & W scanning software. I use Hp and they have greyscale. Here is some advice I was given when I was scanning in receipts that were B & W.

Strictly B&W

Line art or B&W mode is also called 1-bit scanning. The computer/scanner sees the parts of the image as either black or white. This can result in rough edges or jaggies but following these tips helps to eliminate the jaggies. Line art mode usually results in much smaller file sizes.

Scan your image at the same resolution as the output device.

Will you print the image on a 600 dpi laser printer? Scan at 600 spi resolution.

Resize the image while scanning.

Will you print the image at a larger or smaller size than the original? Use the scaling options in your scanning software to resize while scanning. Don't resize in your page layout or graphics program.

You can resize by percentage or by inputting a specific physical size. Use inches to specify printed sizes. Use pixels to specify screen display sizes.

Rotate the image on the scan bed.

Some images, especially 1-bit images, lose definition and don't look as good when rotated in a page layout or graphics program. If you know that you will use the image at an angle, place it at the desired angle in the scanner before scanning.

I never thought of storing them in iPhoto, we always had a folder that we stored them in. I am not sure I like the idea of storing them in iPhoto because we share iPhoto around the house.

reg

mmmpie · May 12, 2004 1:48AM

Quote:

Originally posted by reg

I never thought of storing them in iPhoto, we always had a folder that we stored them in. I am not sure I like the idea of storing them in iPhoto because we share iPhoto around the house.

iPhoto is chosen because:

a) it is free

b) lets you print a full page image with no hassles.

iPhoto Habits

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