Importing new photos into a library
In addition to copying photos that are already in one of your iPhoto libraries, you can also use iPhoto Library Manager to import new photos from your hard drive into one of your iPhoto libraries. To do so, just drag one or more photos or folders full of photos from the Finder and drop them onto a library or album in the iPhoto Library Manager window. The photos will be imported into the library they were dropped on, and if dropped on an album, they will also be added to the album that they were dropped on.
In addition to importing the photos, iPhoto Library Manager can also be configured to assign metadata to the photos you imported based on attributes found in the photos being imported. The following settings can be found in the preferences window:
- Don't import files smaller than X KB: checking this option will automatically filter out any photos in the dropped folders that are smaller than the given size. This is useful, for example, when you have a folder that includes both full size and thumbnail versions of photos and you only want the full size photos imported, just pick a size that's larger than the size of the thumbnails but smaller than the size of the full size photos.
- Set photo date to: sets the date of each imported photo to either the file's creation date, the file's modification date, the current date, or a custom date specified by you
- Set photo comment: sets the comment of each imported photo to the Finder/Spotlight comment of the image file. You can set this comment yourself in the Finder, but many other programs will set the comment of some files themselves. For instance, some web browsers will set a downloaded file's comment to the URL that the file was downloaded from. Using this option will allow you to keep such information around in iPhoto as well.
- Import Spotlight metadata: if the imported files have been indexed by Spotlight and have metadata available for their rating, keywords, or title, you can use these options to carry that information into iPhoto. These options are only available when running in OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or later.
- For each import: specifies how rolls/events should be organized when importing photos. The "Create one roll/event for each folder with photos" will mimic iPhoto's behavior and create a separate roll/event for each folder with photos that's encountered when traversing the folder hierarchy of photos that were dragged in. You can also have all the photos imported as a single roll/event if so desired.