I’ve recently spent a few hours cleaning up my iPhoto library. This included adding proper image titles, keywords, updating Places and Faces info, deleting duplicates (and redundant photos in general), as well as deleting albums, smart folders, and slideshows that have outlived their usefulness. Here are a few tricks I discovered that aren’t documented by Apple, and apparently little-known on the web.
Did you know know you can compare an edited photo to the unedited original? This only works in iPhoto’s Edit mode. In Edit mode, simply hold down the Shift key and you’ll see the photo in all its pure, unedited glory.
Also in Edit mode, it’s possible to quickly zoom in on a particular area of a photo. Simply hover your mouse pointer over the area of interest, and then press the 1 key to zoom to 100 percent in, or press the 2 key for a 200% view. Jump back to fit to view by pressing the 0 key.
Want to hide certain photos in your iPhoto library, but don’t want to actually delete them? Simply right-click (or Control-click) on the secret photos and select “Hide Photo” at the bottom of the list. If you want to see your hidden photos, select View > Hidden Files in the iPhoto menu bar.
I like Faces (though it’s not always amazingly accurate) in iPhoto ’09. Did you know you can change a person’s Key Photo in Faces? This is the photo that shows on the Faces corkboard. To do this, open a photo of the person in Faces. Right-click on the image you want to be the key photo and choose “Make Key Photo.”
You can also scroll your mouse over the Key Photo in Face’s corkboard view, and while the photos are flipping through, click the space bar on the photo of your choice. That will be the person’s new Key Photo.
Here are some more tips about Faces, from Macworld magazine.
I also enjoy Places, iPhoto ’09’s geotagging feature. It’s fun to see my photos on a map. iPhone photos are automatically geotagged, but my other cameras lack a built-in geotagging tool. It’s easy to manually add this information to a photo, but it’s a chore to do this for a big batch of photos.
However, I discovered that it is possible to copy Places information from photo to photo. Simply select a photo that has been tagged with the correct information, right-click (or control-click) on it and choose “Copy” from the contextual menu. Now select your batch of untagged photos, right-click (or control click) on them, and choose “Paste Location.” Now they all share the same location information.
When you delete a photo from your iPhoto library, it goes into iPhoto’s trash. This gives you a margin for error if you accidentally delete a photo. Over time, iPhoto’s trash can fill up with hundreds or even thousands of photos, stealing gigabytes of space from your hard drive. To see the contents of iPhoto’s trash, click on the trash can icon in the left panel of the iPhoto interface. In iPhoto 09, it’s under the “Recent” header. To empty the trash, click on iPhoto > Empty iPhoto Trash in iPhoto’s menu bar at the top of the screen.