John Curtis — Mountain Bike Racer » Blog Archive

Organizing photos with iPhoto

May 28, 2006 – 3:15 pm

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re drowning in photos? I am a big fan of iPhoto, but am generally too lazy to create albums for all of my photos. This means that I am usually browsing the entire library. If I have a general idea when a photo was taken, I can drill down with the built-in date browser to narrow in on what I want, but even that is tedious and I still have to browse through a bunch of very bad photos to get to what I want to view.

Browsing the library works reasonably well until the number of photos that you have grows out of control. I recently purchased the Canon Digital Rebel XT SLR camera and was very excited to try out different types of photography. This was my first camera that would allow me control over the various camera parameters like film speed, aperture, and shutter speed.

In the first day I think I took about 200 photos and had a lot of fun doing it. When I went back to review them I realized that most of what I took should never be seen by anyone ever again. I started dragging them to the trash, but really did not want to do that. For example, I took the classic ‘depth of field’ set where I shot a close-up of a bicycle chain and varied the aperture to play with how much of the chain was in focus. A wide aperture yields a short focus range and a narrow aperture yields a long one. The sequence below was taken to experiment with post processing. I figured that broccoli could benefit from some sharpening in iPhoto, and I seem to have an obsession with frozen food to begin with.

A sequence that should never be seen by anyone

Food

Obviously I am no expert, so you should google for Aperture Tutorial if you want to know more.

I couldn’t bring myself to trash all these test photos, but I really did not want to have hundreds (thousands!) of blurry and terrible photos cluttering my iPhoto library.

To make a long story short, or shorter anyway, I created a couple of iPhoto smart folders to organize things. I broke it down into:

Unsorted
Low Rating
Real Library

To implement each of these categories, I just used the rating filter. All new photos come into the library with a rating of 0. If they are absolutely of no value to me, I delete them. If they are useful for some reason other than ever looking at them again, I assign them a rating of 1. If they are worthy of being viewed, I assign a rating from 2-5.

Now I can view my entire library without any of the terrible photos getting in the way.

Smart Folder for with only good and sorted photos

Reallibrary