Derrick Story at Macworld 2008: Using text to manage photos in iPhoto '08
By Derrick Story
Macworld 2008 Videos
Derrick Story - iPhoto '08
David Pogue - Mac OS X Leopard
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TRANSCRIPT
One of the things that I think is really important when you’re managing your photography because what we used to do we used to take on a trip we’d maybe take dozens of photos in the film days, right? Now we take hundreds of photos. Now we take thousands of photos. We put ‘em all on our computer and then we have to kinda remember where they are or and then find them again.
iPhoto has all sorts of tricks to help you with this but one that I think is really important and that’s still better than everything else is text. Now I could give you my 45 minutes lecture on key wording and the value of key wording but I’m not. I’m not. Key wording’s good and you can do it here, but there’s an easier way. You have the description field. If you just hit this I key right here by the way, it brings up the information box. You can just and then you can just click on a photo, and then you have this description field right here, and you can just say Las Vegas, for instance.
Now the problem with the description field is that it’s sort of awkward when you’re working with a lot of photos ‘cause you do that and then you click here and now you gotta go back here, right? And you come back here and you’re in the description field and you type something for Mac World, come here, then you gotta come back here, and what happens is people sort of get weary of this. Well there’s a way that you can move from image to image. Just click on your first image right here, type your description. I always put “at night” just so we’re, and here are the keys. All you have to do it hold down the command key, right; that’s the Apple key, and then the right bracket just moves you to the next image and leads you in the description field, so then you can type editing, right here or something like that, right.
I don’t have to go clicking around; command key, right bracket takes me to the next one, takes me to the next one and just type in something. Or if I wanna go back to the red eye shot, command and then I do left bracket, brings me back to this field. So now you can have a whole day’s shoot in here and you can just motor through and enter descriptions. And why would we wanna do that? Why did we even care about this? So let’s find one so let’s say Las Vegas. Okay, so now let’s say I’m just in my photos here. Down here at the search, if I just type “Vegas”, all my Las Vegas shots show up instantly right here including the one we just looked at. That fast, really fast. So this is why the little bit of description worked, and this is the easiest way to go about your business in iPhoto of adding text. Now this search field by the way down here, you can limit it to different things. You click on it; you can just limit it to ratings or key words or all, but all is prob’ly the easiest way to go, and all will search in those description fields.
So now that I’ve shown you an easy way to add descriptions, again, just hold down the command key and do the right and left brackets to go from photo to photo, even if you’re just adding the same thing, if you’re just cutting and pasting. So if right here, if I put San Francisco, and then I decide you know what, I just wanna make sure that San Francisco’s in all these shots, so I hit command-C to copy it, right, and then command-bracket. Well I don’t wanna do it in this shot, so I’ll keep going, not here, not here, not here. Well these aren’t in San Francisco. Let us say that this was coming into San Francisco, takes me all the way to that description field, then I hit command-V and paste it in. Now I have an easy way to retrieve all of these photos, so descriptions in iPhoto I think is a really nice way to add Meta data to your pictures.
