Exploring iPhoto's ratings, keywords, and local sharing features
You’d think that after seven full lessons on the workings of a “simple” image cataloging and editing application such as iPhoto we would have thoroughly exhausted the subject. But no, I have just a little more to talk about before I can wrap up this soon-to-be-tidy package.
Ratings and keywords
We’ve talked about iPhoto’s smart albums—albums that iPhoto can generate based on the conditions you create, such as pictures taken with a flash during 2012. You can make your smart albums even more powerful by “tagging” your images with ratings and keywords. Slap a five-star rating on your favorite images, and it becomes a cinch to gather them into a single smart album. Assign the keyword “jojo” to any pictures that include that ill-favored cousin, and you never need view the guy’s smarmy mug again. Doing each is easy to accomplish.
The ratings game: iPhoto allows you to assign a rating from zero to five stars. You can invoke such a rating in a few ways. The first is to choose Photos > My Rating and then choose the rating you like. Or you can Control-click (right-click) an image and, in the menu that appears, click the appropriate star rating (see the screenshot above). But the easiest method of all is to select one or more images and press the appropriate keyboard shortcut: the Command key plus any number from 0 to 5.
Even with the keyboard shortcut, this task can be tedious when you’re confronting a library that holds thousands of images. You can deal with such a backlog at your leisure. In the meantime, get into the habit of rating new images right after you’ve imported them.
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