Better way to organize my images?

You're not really telling us very muc about your current system there, so here's a generic answer that might spark some ideas for you.

I use Events simply as big buckets of Photos: Spring 08, July - Nov 06 are typical Events in my Library. I use keywords and Smart Albums extensively. I title the pics broadly.

I keyword on a

Who

What

Where basis (The When is in the photos's Exif metadata). I also rate the pics on a 1 - 5 star basis.

Using this system I can find pretty much find any pic in my 40k library in a couple of seconds.

So, for example, I have a batch of pics titled 'Seattle 08' and a typical keywording might include: John, Anne, Landscape, mountain, trees, snow. With a rating included it's so very easy to find the best pics we took at Mount Rainier.

File -> New Smart Album

set it to 'All"

title contains Seattle

keyword is mountain

keyword is snow

rating is 5 stars

Or, want a chronological album of John from birth to today?

New Smart Album

Keyword is John

Set the View options to Sort By Date Ascending

Want only the best pics?

add Rating is greater than 4 stars

The best thing about this system is that it's dynamic. If I add 50 more pics of John to the Library tomorrow, as I keyword and rate them they are added to the Smart Album.

In the end, organisation is about finding the pics. The point is to make locating that pic or batch of pics findable fast. This system works for me.

You don't have to Search because you can save the Search as a Smart Album. Suppose you want to group photos of your Dog. Then tag them with Rover. Now make a Smart Album (Keyword -> is -> Rover) and click on it if you want to see the dog photos.

But here's better: Suppose some of those photos also have your cat in them. If you use Events then you will need to duplicates the cat photos to make a cat Event.

However, if you tag them and make a Smart Album (keyword -> is -> Tiddles) then the photos that have both tags will turn up in both Albums.

So it's very flexible.

Try experiment on 50 or so photos, See what you get.

Regards

TD

Two ways:

Using iPhoto Library Manager you can move the photos plus all associated metadata and versions between libraries

Alternatively, File -> Export, set the Kind to Jpeg and check the box at 'Titles and Keywords' This will write these things to the IPTC metadata of the file and be available in any other photo app. Note that you can't do this with the Ratings but you can easily make a keyword of them (1star, 2star) and use those to recreate the ratings on the other machine.

Regards

TD

Super helpful for me too! Thank you! Now debating if I want to scan old print copies of pictures or take them to a photo place and have them put them all on a disc for me...

Yes that is correct

But generally that would not be an issue

LN

That depends on many things none of which involve iPhoto. Only you can make that decision

LN

You won't lose more than a single generation - the impact will be negligible.

Regards

TD

I have just had to create a new library from my 40,000 pictures. It has put them in about 1500 events based probably on when taken, scanned, downloaded, etc.

What I had, that I liked, was an event for each of my car projects (Corvair with over 5000 pictures in it) and events of the house construction, grandchildren, trips, or different projects.

After loading from the camera chip, I'd flag the ones I wanted to move, click on the right event and put "add flagged items to event", then clear the flags.

Is is better to use albums and just move them to the albums?

I read about keywords, but that doesn't seem as easy as just clicking on an event or album and having them show. And whatever I do I have to do for 40,000+ pictures

I think Albums and keywords and ratings are much more powerful than Events. Best thing: you can select - so rather than clicking on an Event of grandchildren and seeing all 8,000 shots, you can have a best of Album, or an Album for each individual kid. Best of all, as Albums reference the shots in the Library, a shot can be in more than one album using no extra disk space.

So, think of it. Your favourite shot of your grand kids in an Album, then also in your Album for each kid and also in your Album for all...

read about keywords, but that doesn't seem as easy as just clicking on an event or album and having them show.

It is if you make an album based on the keyword... See above.

But that's up to you...

Does this mean to change from my Event managing, I need to go into every single photo and give it a keyword?

You can select as many pictures as you want and write the keywords once while they are selected.