Ease the moving of photos between events in iPhoto '08

Aug 10, '07 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: robg

I don't have a lot of usage time with iPhoto '08 yet, but so far, I absolutely hate it. Now before you all scream what?!?!, understand that I believe I will eventually love it. However, at the moment, it's been nothing but pain for me. Why? Because the new vaunted Events require a total rework of my existing image library.

In prior versions of iPhoto, one camera import was a roll, regardless of how much time this covered. That makes sense to me, and means that if you take a few pictures a day for a week or so, you'll wind up with one roll when you finally do your import. In the new iPhoto, you would wind up with perhaps five events instead, assuming you've left the iPhoto events time period set to its default of one day.

While this will prove to be a better organization thought in the long run, in the short run, it requires more work than the old method. For instance, if that week's worth of photos is of nothing but my kids playing around the house, well, that's really one event. Similarly, existing rolls probably need some serious editing to be properly structured as events, requiring the moving of a large number of images from event to event.

In the old iPhoto, you could simply drag images from roll to roll to reorganize them. In the new iPhoto, with the "photo browser in preview icon" behavior, you can't do that -- at least not using the default Events view.

To move photos in Events view mode, you need to first flag the images to be moved, select the destination event, use the Events » Add Flagged Photos to Events menu item to move them, then select the Flagged entry in the RECENT section of iPhoto, and unflag the photos. Ugh. Here's a simpler workaround, and while somewhat obvious, I thought it worth sharing for others who are now going through their existing libraries and trying to convert to the new Events metaphor.

Instead of using the Events library, switch to the Photos library, and make sure View » Event Titles is enabled. The Photos view works much like the old Rolls-based view, and you can move photos from event to event via drag and drop. The annoyance (at least for now?) in the Photos mode is that new images will always sort to the bottom of the window, regardless of your View » Sort Photos setting (which seems to apply to photos within an event in the Photos view, but to events themselves in the Events view. I hope this is a bug and not a feature!). Still, it's much easier to move photos around in the Photos view than in the Events view.

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