Last week we talked a little about how iPhoto deals with your photos within the Mac’s Finder, to basically help protect you from yourself. In other words, iPhoto gives you the ability to completely screw up a photo trying to make it better, but always be able to recover the original, so you can try to screw it up again.

After awhile, though, you’ll get this editing thing down, and your iPhoto library will expand dramatically. One of the great things about digital photography is you can take (within the limits of your camera’s memory card and the storage space on your computer) virtually unlimited images. Why? Because you’re the “developer”. No more walking around the local superstore bumping into people, carts, and $650 disposable P.C.’s while you’re trying to see if your pictures came out. Right after you take the shot, you can review it on your camera’s screen. Don’t like it? Delete it on the spot.

Regardless, your photo library will increase in size. Apple claims that iPhoto can handle 25,000 photos within its Library structure. However, if you’re taking a lot of higher resolution photos, you’re also moving around a lot of megabytes of data. Even before you reach the magic 25,000 number, you’ll notice iPhoto getting a bit slower, with a little hitch in its step here and there. You think, quite logically, “Well, no problem, I’ll make a new Library”. Then you notice iPhoto doesn’t have anything within it to manage multiple Libraries. So, what do you do when you fill a Library up?

Never fear. You can use the excellent freeware application, “iPhoto Library Manager”, to create new iPhoto Libraries, and switch back and forth between them with ease. Unlike the Library that iPhoto creates, you can keep your other Libraries anywhere on the computer you wish. As the fetching Mrs. Z is taking beautiful photos almost faster than I can keep adding hard drives, we have taken to creating new Libraries every six months (or as needed), and naming them something like “iPhoto Jan – Jun 2005”. There are some limitations with this process. You can’t have more than one Library open at a time, so you can’t transfer photos from one open iPhoto window to another. iPhoto Library Manager can be found HERE, and the best thing is, it’s free!

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski