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iPhoto 101: Use two fingers to crop and rotate photos

by Mike Schramm Feb 24th 2011 at 9:00PM

Here's an interesting feature of iPhoto that I'd never heard of before, courtesy of Mac OS X Hints. While using Edit mode in the app, you can drag two fingers on your MacBook's touchpad (or your Magic Trackpad) to control the various edits with better precision than just dragging around a mouse. You can zoom the crop feature in or out, or even control it manually by dragging two fingers around. And you can rotate the photo in straighten mode just by rotating two fingers around the trackpad.

There are more of these little gesture features hidden in Apple's iApps (like a three-finger swipe in iPhoto to move forward/backward through photos), and I'm sure we'll see a lot more of these pop up as we move closer to Lion and beyond. That touch interface is so intuitive and easy that it's no surprise Apple is already implementing it everywhere that it makes sense to do so.



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Here's an interesting feature of iPhoto that I'd never heard of before, courtesy of Mac OS X Hints. While using Edit mode in the app,...
 

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7 Comments

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Mike

Turpster!!!!! Shramm you tricky bastard.

February 25 2011 at 3:31 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mr Lizard

Its not so intuitive if you didn't know about it.

Once you know about them, and are shown how to use them, they feel intuitive but you have to know they're there to start with.

(It's the reason there are video clips in system preferences to show you how to use the gestures.)

Making gestures more discoverable isn't easy though, so it'll be interesting to see how Apple tackles this with Lion.

February 25 2011 at 2:27 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
mailiaftw

Be sure to crop Turpster's shorts.

February 25 2011 at 12:06 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to mailiaftw's comment
Mike Schramm

You're a winner!

February 25 2011 at 5:07 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
John.B

Do you get any better precision with your fingers than you do with a mouse? Isn't that why serious Photoshop jockeys all use Wacom pen tablets?

February 24 2011 at 9:54 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
jollyllama

While these gestures are neat little tricks, you really need to download BetterTouchTool to give you the power that Apple should have implemented - the ability to assign any gesture to any keystroke or command in any program.

February 24 2011 at 9:26 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
john

In Safari, navigate to a couple different pages in the same tab... then a three finger swipe will move you forward and backward thru the links you have navigated to.

February 24 2011 at 9:18 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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