Beginning AppleScript®

11.2. Scripting iPhoto

The iPhoto application provides a convenient way for you to organize the images on your computer. Typically, these images are photographs; most often, these photographs have been imported from a digital camera that you connect to your Mac. The application can be set up to automatically import new photos into iPhoto whenever you connect a camera to your system. In iPhoto, you can easily set up slide shows with background music, create QuickTime movies, publish web pages, order prints, and do minor retouching of your photos.

iPhoto stores all your photos in a master library. From that library you can create albums of photos. If you spotted the analogy here to the iTunes libraryplaylisttrack structure, you're one step ahead of the game. The next couple of Try It Out examples take a closer look at iPhoto. This section is based on version 4.0.3 of iPhoto. Please make sure you are using a current version of iPhoto. One command (import) did not exist in earlier versions of the application.

11.2.1.

11.2.1.1. Try It Out: Examining iPhoto's Dictionary

Once again, examining an application's dictionary is a good place to start when you want to write scripts to work with the application. In the following steps, you look at the iPhoto dictionary:

1. Open the iPhoto dictionary ...