iPhoto Gestures

Feb 24, '11 07:30:01AM

Contributed by: tchenj

Here are some fun gestures you can use in iPhoto that I couldn't find documented anywhere. When in edit mode, two finger gestures do some nifty things! First, open a photo in iPhoto and enter Edit mode.

While in Straighten Mode:

You can fine tune the amount of tilt using the 'rotate' gesture in either direction. Rotate Left to decrease the angle, Rotate Right increases the angle (it feels backwards whenever I do it).

While in Crop mode (with constrain turned on):

When you un-check constrain, things get a little crazy. Since the crop corners map directly to your fingers, you can change the overall crop shape from rectangular to square, or vice versa.

Suppose you set your right thumb and pointer on the trackpad (thumb bottom left quadrant, pointer top right). iPhoto seems to map the finger locations as relative, rather than absolute, though. Following our prior example, moving the thumb to a location where it is higher up the trackpad than the pointer finger, but still to the left of it, would cause the top left (as opposed to bottom left) handle to move. Similarly, the pointer finger would now relate to the bottom right (instead of bottom left) handle. This happens when you move one finger past another with regards to left and right as well. Two finger scrolling seems to lock in the crop frame, just as before.

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one. I don't have one of the fancy newer trackpads that supports these gestures. Plus I've always used an external editor with iPhoto anyway.]

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