Praise the heavens, do a little dance and buy Apple's iLife engineers a beer - iPhoto '08 finally solves a long-standing annoyance by allowing selective importing. In previous versions, iPhoto simply offered a big fat 'Import' button, giving you no choice in which images to bring over from your digital camera or mobile phone. Convincing me to agree with folks who say iPhoto is finally learning a few tricks from its
older bigger brother Aperture, I plugged in my iPhone today to perform my first import into the new iPhoto, and I caught these two options: Import Selected and 'Hide photos already imported.' The new import dialog itself has been updated, presenting thumbnails of all the photos on the device you plugged in. This new Import Selected option allows you to manually select as many or as few images as you like (either by holding the command key to select individual photos or holding shift to select a range) and only import those. The 'Hide photos already imported' option, circled at the bottom left of the iPhoto window (above), is really handy for those who often import pictures off devices like mobile phones but would prefer to permanently keep at least some of them on the device for good posture. Toggling that will hide and review all the photos you've already imported, allowing you to keep those photos out of your way or reveal them to ensure your libraries are still in sync.
This is a great new feature that should bring smiles to both heavy and casual photo importers alike. I think I speak on behalf of a lot of iPhoto users when I say: thank you Apple.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Rob said 5:50PM on 8-10-2007
It's about time. I was tired of looking at my photos in the finder to decide which ones to import to the desktop first and then iPhoto.
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koen said 6:00PM on 8-10-2007
Yeah, that's really good... I used the Image capture program, located in the Applications folder before. And then imported it into iPhoto... This is definitely a lot better! Thanks Apple!
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john russell said 6:04PM on 8-10-2007
Is it just me, or was there a hidden way to do this in iPhoto '06?
I am positive I did it once in iPhoto. The only problem was it was hard to get to.
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Dan Gleckler said 6:32PM on 8-10-2007
Is the file system organized by 'Events' now? The only reason I never used iPhoto was because of the horrrrible way it organized my photos in the finder.
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Bill said 6:35PM on 8-10-2007
I don't have iPhoto yet, but will this fix the issue with importing a pic from the iphone that was already uploaded to a web gallery? This causes a double import.
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David Fischer said 10:33AM on 8-11-2007
"Convincing me to agree with folks who say iPhoto is finally learning a few tricks from its older brother Aperture"
Did iPhoto learn this from Aperture, or from Picasa, which has done this for a year or so now? (Perhaps by iPhoto '10, it will be caught up with Picasa.) Or by then Picasa will be available on the Mac.
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Macroy said 7:19PM on 8-10-2007
You can do this in iPhoto '06, by hitting "return" twice on the camera import screen. I probably read that here at TUAW!
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rick said 7:24PM on 8-10-2007
"You can do this in iPhoto '06, by hitting "return" twice on the camera import screen."
Which begs the question - what happens when you hit return twice in the same window in iPhoto '08?
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Tironius said 9:41PM on 8-10-2007
iPhoto '06 has always been able to did this. You can learn how here:
http://www.thepoundersblog.com/2007/07/molly-wood-is-cunt-tutorial-on.html
Is anyone else concerned about the name iPhoto '08. It's 2007. Does this mean no iLife next year?
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JKT said 10:49PM on 8-10-2007
David Fischer, it was not learned from anything but other Apple software--the built-in Image Capture utility has had this feature for 5 years (which is why I never use iPhoto to import from my camera, and advise others against doing so as well.)
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ChillyWilly said 2:54AM on 8-11-2007
I used the same TUAW tip in iPhoto '06 to do selected imports.
As for iPhoto '08, does this "new" selected import feature also let you rename the physical filename from IMG09575.JPG to something like vacation-calif-trip-01.jpg ? I know that Aperture does, and that the new iPhoto borrows some features from it.
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David Chartier said 9:41PM on 8-11-2007
#11: If you want to get technical about it, Image Capture - provided in Mac OS X's Applications folder I believe since 10.0 (or at least since 10.2 - has done this for nearly half a decade now.
Each of these apps have their pros and cons, and each fortunately evolve and get inspired based on what their competitors are doing. Picasa might serve some people very well, and I actually prefer some Picasa features to iPhoto, but overall iPhoto and Picasa are pretty well matched when you consider their target audience and their strengths.
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