I’m a big cynic when it comes to anything that’s free, add to that my natural design snob nature and it’s easy to understand why I never bothered to open iPhoto for the first two years I had it at work and home. However, we started a project in my office, and organizing pictures from three different external sources along with our photo library was more than I could bear. I broke my own rule, opened iPhoto and I have never regretted it.

Organize your pictures with iPhoto
Whether you’re importing pics from your digital camera, uploading shots your friend gave you on CD or importing a batch of images you’ve scanned out of an old family album, iPhoto offers flexible ways to organize the lot. For importing your own digital pics, it’s as easy as plugging your camera in – iPhoto has built-in drivers for the majority of common cameras, so it really is as easy as plug-and-play.

You can import images from CD or other pictures that aren’t already in your iPhoto library just by typing command-o and navigating to the folder you’re after. When importing, you can include keywords, dates and other information to help you keep the images organized. For my office project, this meant we could import images from everywhere, keeping track of whose they were, when they arrived and where they belonged in our catalog.

iPhoto helps you share your images
If you’ve got a family anything like mine, sending pictures of the kids or that remodelled kitchen can be a real pain. Never fear – you can export images from iPhoto into simple web pages, create stunning slideshows, share images with friends online via your .Mac account, order prints, burn images to CD and send them via email.

Perhaps the most useful thing iPhoto does is make it simple to email images at sensible sizes so that even those of us still cursed with dial-up connections can cope with sending and receiving them. You select the pictures you want to share, find ‘email’ under the ‘sharing’ menu and iPhoto presents you with a drop-down menu to select an appropriate size from. What’s better than that? If you’re writing an email, you can simply drop an image onto the window you’re typing in and a pop-up menu appears in the bottom right-hand corner of the window to allow you to resize images on the fly.

Also, any images in your iPhoto library are readily available to the other applications in Apple’s iWork and iLife collections – so if you’re putting together a Keynote presentation, your photographs are only a click away