Working with Events in iPhoto

Thursday, July 02 2009

By: chrisb

Making the most of Events

Skimming Demo - Click to watch

One of the ways the iPhoto organizes your photos is by Events. When you import photos, iPhoto takes all the photos from a single day and creates an Event for them. The thinking here is that most events are one day long so iPhoto is grouping like photos together. See below if you have multiple day Events or more than one Event per day.

You can see all of your Events by selecting Events under the LIBRARY section at the top left of the iPhoto window.

Here are some things you can do with Events:

Open them. Double click on an Event to see the photos inside as. From there you can edit, rotate, email, etc. There are arrows on the top tool bar to move from Event to Event and a back button to return to All Events.
Reorder them. Select an Event and drag it around the Events list. Other Events will move out of the way to let you put it where you want.
Name them. When created, Events are named with the date of the Event. Click on the date to get a text field where you can type in a name.
Merge them. If you have two Events that really should be just one, (like a two-day trip) drag one Event onto an other one. Or select multiple Events and click the Merge button in the bottom toolbar.
Split them. If you had two events on the same day, (a wedding and a baseball game, for example) iPhoto imported them into the same Event. To split them into two separate Events, open the Event by double-clicking it. Select the first photo that belongs in the second Event and click the Split button on the bottom toolbar.
Skim them. Skimming is a new technique in iPhoto that lets you quickly preview the contents of an Event without opening it. To Skim, move the cursor from left to right across the event. Watch the demo video to see how skimming works.
Set the preview image on them. By default, an Event shows the first photo in the Event as the preview. You can change the preview to any photo in the Event by Skimming and when you find the photo you want as a preview, hitting the space bar.