MacMost Now 335: iPhoto Smart Albums

You can use Smart Albums in iPhoto 09 to get a list of all photos taken with a single camera, like the iPhone 3GS. You can also use other criteria like camera settings, keywords, descriptions, ratings and dates. Smart Albums update automatically and will sync back to your iPhone or iPod Touch.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode lets take a look at smart photo albums in iPhoto 09. So just like you can create smart folders in the Finder and smart playlists in Itunes, you can create smart albums in iPhoto. These are very useful for organizing your photos and seeing what you have. Lets take a look. See, here we are in iPhoto and I'm going to create a smart album from the file menu. I start off by naming it and then I'm going to give it a condition. So, in this case I'm going to create something fairly common. I'm going to look through all the different things I can base the condition on. And instead of picking something like title or keyword, event, that type of thing. I'm going to pick one of the piece information about the photo. A lot of information is stored when you take a photo such as the camera aperture, whether the flash is on, focal length, that kind of thing. I'm actually going to choose camera model. And then I'm going to set it to be, is, and im going to chose from a list of camera models. This is all the different camera models used to take photos in this collection. So, I'm going to chose the iPhone 3gs, and click ok. And I'm going to get this photo album here and I'm only going to get one photo in it. The only one in the collection taken with the iPhone 3gs. So right away you can see the usefulness here. Several people in the last few weeks have asked me how they can just isolate the photos they've taken with their iPhones, instead of the photos that they've taken with a digital camera. Here's one way to do it. I can also make the smart album a little more perplex I'm going to control click on it here to edit it and I'm going to change it and add a second condition by pressing the plus button here. I'm going to set this one to camera model, is iPhone, the regular iPhone. And I'm going where it says match all of the following conditions, want to change that to any of the following conditions. So it will be either the iPhone 3gs or iPhone. And I click ok I see I have more pictures here. Some pictures taken with my old iPhone, some taken with my new iPhone 3gs. And we can do lots of interesting things here with the smart albums for instance if we pick ISO as out criteria we can see we have different speeds here so chances are the 100's are mostly taken outside, whereas the 400's might mostly taken inside, depends on the camera and how you use it. But it could be a really quick way to sort through photos to find some things that you're looking for. Of course you could also use this hand entered information here like album name, text, description, that type of thing. For instance you can use keywords and you can have keywords that might be assigned to your photos. If you look back at episode 246, you'll see how to assign keywords to all your photos. So, if you've tagged them all, then you can create some smart albums based on the tags you've applied to your photos. Now smart albums update live. That means if you create a smart album that looks for keywords assigned to photos, if you assign more photos to those keywords, they'll automatically be assigned to those smart albums. And same thing if you have a smart album for all your pictures taken with your iPhone, as soon as you add more iPhone pictures, they'll automatically be added to those smart albums. Now if you sync them back to your iPhone or to another device like the apple tv, then you'll find that it automatically updates when you sync again to show the new photos in those albums. So I hope you've found this useful. Till next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Comments: 4 Responses to “MacMost Now 335: iPhoto Smart Albums”

WAG

15 years ago

hi,,,
i hv a apple remote, it's next button is not working, how to fix that problem?
please help me!!! thanks!!!

Gary Rosenzweig

If it is broken, then you need to get it fixed or get a new one.

Franco

12 years ago

Gary,I was previously working with iPhoto 09 and created several smart albums. Assigning keywords to have my photos "magically" go to my created smart album was great. I recently upgraded to iPhoto 11. Now when I assign keywords to new photos I've taken, expecting them to "magically" go to that corresponding smart album, nothing happens. Can you help me out?

Not sure. You'll have to play around with it. Try re-creating those smart albums. Make sure you are tagging it with the exact same keywords, not just copies of the keywords that look the same.

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MacMost Now 335: iPhoto Smart Albums

Comments: 4 Responses to “MacMost Now 335: iPhoto Smart Albums”

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