Use iPhoto’s Places menu to make your photos easier to search and quicker to show off
iPhoto is great because it offers a range of useful photo information all in one place, and makes it all searchable. This means that no matter which photo you’re looking for, you’ll always be able to find it quickly. One of these pieces of information is location data; when you take a photo, location information is automatically added to it, and this information is passed to iPhoto. In the main sidebar, you can click the Places menu and see on a map exactly where you’ve been and what you’ve photographed in each area. Some photos won’t include this information, though, and in those situations, adding the location manually will help you to complete your collection. Thankfully, iPhoto makes the process really straightforward.
Step-by-step Manually add location data
1. Automatic tags
Shots taken on an iPhone or iPad, or on certain cameras with GPS capabilities, will have location data added automatically. It’s incredibly accurate, as you’ll see from the map.
2. Create a Smart Album
To find all your untagged shots, create a new Smart Album with the criteria ‘Photo is not tagged with GPS’. This will gather them all into one place for you to click through.
3. Edit an event
Alternatively, if your shots are all tagged and you add a new event, click the event and open up the Info sidebar, so you can add a general location to all the shots at once.
4. Add a location
To add a location to a single shot, select it, open the Info sidebar and click the search bar above the map. Type in the location you want and choose the corresponding option from the list.
5. Edit location
You can edit the location by clicking and holding on the pin that has been dropped until it rises from the map. Drag it around and then let it go to change the location slightly.
6. Be more specific
You can also use the zoom buttons in the bottom-left of the map window to zoom in and out. If you need to be more specific, this is the perfect way to do it.
7. Rename location
If you want to give your location a different name, you can. Click the pin and the name will appear; you can edit it to anything you like, then hit the Tick button to apply it.
8. Quicker tagging
If a single event spans a number of different locations, you can select groups of photos that are taken in one place and add a location, then select the next group, and so on.
9. View your places
To see all your pinned locations on a larger map, hit the Places button in the sidebar on the left. A full-window map will open and you can view your travels in a different way.
Mapping it out
Getting to grips with the map view
Knowledge base
Places everywhere The location information you add to your photo will be added to the data in the image file itself, so when you upload your shots to Flickr, or other similar services, the information will be available for others to see, if you wish it to be. It’s a great way to put your memories on the map.
Change the map
Now that Apple is using its own mapping software in iPhoto, you can switch between the three view modes to get a totally different feel to the Places section of the app
View the shots
Click on a pin and the name of the location will appear. From here, you can click the arrow to see all the shots taken in that particular area. Zoom in to an area and the pins will split into multiple locations
Search locations
Once you’ve added location data to your shots, you’ll be able to find them using that information. To find all the shots from a specific location, simply hit the Search button in the bottom-left and type it in
Picking specifics
The bar that sits at the top-left of the screen enables you to pick from a range of specific options, so you can view all the photos taken in a country, in a city or in one special place
