iPhoto '11: The Missing Manual

With better ways to get your photos online and new options for creating printed projects, iPhoto '11 makes it easier than ever to transfer photos from a digital camera, organize them, and publish, print, or share them in maps—but there's still no printed manual for the program. Fortunately, David Pogue and Lesa Snider team up in this witty, authoritative book that should have been in the box.

• Organize your collection. Discover all of the options for grouping your pictures—by events, in albums, or based on who’s in the photo or where it was taken.
• Sharpen your editing skills. Learn how to use iPhoto’s beefed-up editing options, including its Photoshop-like adjustments panel.
• Share images online. Get your photos to everyone on your list by publishing them to Flickr, Facebook, and MobileMe.
• Dive into creative projects. Have fun building slideshows (with music), gift books, calendars, and cards.

5 Tips from the Author

1. Flags are a great way to mark photos for deletion en masse (instead of deleting them one at a time). As soon as you import photos, take a spin through ’em and, when you find one you want to delete, click to select its thumbnail and then press Command - . (that’s the Command key plus the period key) to flag it. Alternatively, hover your cursor over photo’s thumbnail and then click the tiny gray flag that appears in its top right (it looks like a miniature pennant). Either way, you’ll see a tiny orange pennant appear at the thumbnail’s top left. Once you’re finished, click Flagged in your Source list, choose Select All to highlight all the flagged thumbnails, and then press the Delete key. When iPhoto asks if you’re sure you want to delete those photos, click OK and poof! iPhoto moves all those photos into its very own trash.
2. Need to split an Event into two? Open the Event and click the thumbnail you want to mark the start of the new Event, and then press the S key. It’s as simple as that!
3. Want to see the month and year your photos were taken as you’re scrolling through thumbnails in either Events or Photos view? You’re in luck! Choose iPhoto Preferences and turn on “Show informational overlays.” Now, next time you scroll through thumbnails, you’ll see the month and year appear in the middle of the viewing area. Sweet!
4. Cruising around in Photos view can be a little overwhelming, especially when all of the Event names are expanded so you see thousands of thumbnails. The fix is to collapse all the Events en masse by Option-clicking the flippy triangle to the left of the Event’s name in the main photo-viewing area. That way you can expand them one at a time as you wish. (Option- clicking a collapsed flippy triangle will expand them all, too.)
5. Smart Albums and Faces tags are the perfect way to quickly put together a slideshow for your next party. For example, if you’ve tagged friends and family using Faces, you can create a Smart Album by simply dragging someone’s picture from the Faces corkboard into an empty area in your Source list. If you want to add another person to that Smart Album, simply drag his image into the same Smart Album to create a self-populating album of just those two people.