A short introduction to iPhoto

iPhoto is free software designed to catalog and work with photos using Mac OS X. You use it by importing your images into albums. Once your images are imported, you are working on copies that are kept in a special iPhoto format. Once you are ready to share them, you need to Export them.

This tutorial shows you how to import a folder of pictures into iPhoto and work with an individual picture.

The iPhoto start screen

When you first open up iPhoto, you will be in Organize mode but there will be nothing to organize.

Importing images

For now, we aren't going to explore how to use iPhoto to organize and catalog your images but will only import a single folder. Use the Import command under the File menu. A standard Open dialog will appear. Use it to find your images and select the folder they are in.

All imported images start out in the Photo Library. To make working with images manageable, you need to create albums and put the images in them. To put whatever you've last imported into a new album, select "Last Roll" from the "Source" panel on the left:

Then select all the images on the right and drag them into the Source panel. An album with the name of the folder they came from will be created automatically. In this case, the album is called "2005-06-04 CCIA Jrs".

Once you have an album, you can selected it from the Source panel and then select individual images to work on. You can rotate the image right there or select the Edit view and work on it in the Edit pane.

Now you are ready to use iPhoto to prepare an image for the screen.