iPhoto 6: The Missing Manual, 5th Edition

Chapter 14. iPhoto File Management

For years, true iPhoto fans experienced the heartache of iPhoto Overload—the syndrome in which the program gets too full of photos, winds up gasping for RAM, and acts as if you’ve slathered it with a thick coat of molasses. And for years, true iPhoto fans have adopted an array of countermeasures to keep the speed up, including splitting the Photo Library into several smaller chunks.

Now that iPhoto can manage 250,000 pictures per library, such drastic measures aren’t generally necessary.

Nonetheless, learning how iPhoto manages its library files is still a worthy pursuit. It’s the key to swapping Photo Libraries, burning them to CD, transferring them to other machines, and merging them together.

About iPhoto Discs

iPhoto CDs are discs (either CDs or DVDs) that you can create in iPhoto to archive your entire Photo Library—or any selected portion of it—with just a few mouse clicks.

The beauty of iPhoto’s Burn command is that it exports much more than just the photos themselves to a disc. It also copies the thumbnails, titles, keywords, comments, ratings, and all the other important data about your Photo Library. Once you’ve burned all of this valuable information to disc, you can do all sorts of useful things:

• Make a backup of your whole Photo Library for safekeeping.

• Transfer specific photos, albums, or a whole Photo Library to another Mac without losing all your keywords, descriptions, ratings, and titles.

• Share discs with other iPhoto fans so that ...