Iphoto Tags

Tagging has become a staple for all of us writing for the web. Some people still get confused with tagging and equate that to categories. While there are similarities, and I’m sure some people use them as categories, tags are usually used to specifically identify something. You can have one or more tags, they don’t have to match your title or even your article but be something related. For example, you could have a category called “dogs”, but if you are writing about golden retrievers you could have tags: golden retrievers, sporting dogs, furry dogs, red dogs, retrievers…..get it?

Iphoto ‘09

You already have an example of tagging with the features available in Iphoto ‘09. Yes—you’ve guessed it. Faces and Places! Those are the examples of tagging. You can tag all of your favorite pics of your favorite person and all the places with that person in it!

Iphoto ‘08

While Iphoto ‘08 doesn’t have the faces and places features, it does have basic tagging features you can use to essentially do the same thing, except manually.

Individually

Open up your events or album of choice and select a picture. On your keyboard press the COMMAND KEY (apple) +SHIFT + K. This will allow you to see the keywords underneath each photo.

Next enter the keyword that you want for that photo, by clicking in the box where it says “add keywords”. Do that for each of the photos you want to tag. On the bottom of your Iphoto window, type in the keyword to search for your pictures and press ENTER. All of the pictures you “tagged” will show up.

Group Tag

Now let’s say you have a batch of pictures you took and you want to tag them. Obviously, tagging them individually would be rather time-consuming and laborious –and what if you wanted to add more than one tag to each picture? Would you have to sit there and type all day? Therefore, you’d want to tag by group.

Press COMMAND+ K to view keywords

All the keywords you have created will be displayed here. If you click on EDIT KEYWORDS you’ll be able to create new ones or edit existing ones. Simply select the pictures you want  (You can press the SHIFT key and drag a box around a group of pictures to select more than one) and click on the keyword. You can even add a keyboard shortcut to add that keyword.