4 Free iPhoto Tools You Need To Have On Your Mac.

Apple’s big punch in iLife ‘08 is iPhoto, now that iTunes is free. Most of us use iTunes and iPhoto and that’s not likely to change any time soon.

How about those little utilities for iPhoto that really make it a cool and fun Mac utility? Not that there’s anything wrong with iPhoto. It’s not Photoshop and Bridge and needs a little help.

By far the most important extra tool you can add to iPhoto replaces a little-known feature. Multiple iPhoto libraries. Why do you need more libraries?

#1 - Multiple iPhoto Libraries (the Apple way)
It’s simple, really. I take photos with my digital camera and store them in iPhoto. I don’t want other photos to “contaminate” my library. Press the Option key on your Mac’s keyboard and then start up iPhoto. Look at that. Another secret Apple feature.

iPhoto pops up a simple splash screen with three buttons you may not have seen before. Quit. Create a Library, Choose a Library. Select Create a Library and iPhoto opens up empty and waiting for you to add photos. Add as many as you wish. Then quit.

Open iPhoto again while hold down the Option key and you get the same dialog (conversely, if you don’t hold down the Option key, iPhoto opens whichever Library you last opened) box. This time click Choose Library. Now you’ll see your original iPhoto Library and the name of the newly created iPhoto Library.

That’s a simple and easy way to manage a number of different iPhoto libraries so your digital images don’t get cross contaminated. I’m a little obsessive compulsive about organizing such things.

#2 - iPhoto Buddy (the better way)
There’s yet a better way to manage multiple Libraries in iPhoto. It’s called iPhoto Buddy. It’s a straightforward, free Mac utility that manages and lists your iPhoto libraries for you, so you can see the some of what’s inside, when it was last modified, and so on.

iPhoto Buddy also lets you manage libraries on other Macs, or elsewhere on your own Mac.

#3 - Keyword Management
iPhoto ‘08’s keyword management isn’t bad, but previous iPhoto versions leave much to be desired. Enter Keyword Assistant from Ken Ferry for previous iPhoto versions. What you want is an easier way to manage keywords, which only become handy when you have lots of them. Keyword Assistant lets you enter keywords with an auto-complete mechanism to assign keywords to multiple photos at a time.

What about keyword management in iPhoto ‘08? Even better than Apple’s implementation is the inexpensive Keyword Manager. This is the slick and sassy keyword tool that Apple should have installed in iPhoto.

Nested keywords, quick tagging, and keyword suggestions based on who’s in your AddressBook. It doesn’t get much better than this. Except for the price tag.

#2 - Photo Albums
So you’ve got lots of photos and you want to make a gallery or a web page album. iPhoto does it but the result isn’t typical Apple. Frankly, iPhoto’s outputs are notoriously sparse. Enter Galerie. Take your iPhoto digital images and let Galerie create a media gallery without all the work.

The variety of templates is excellent (they can also be edited if you’re geeky enough to dig into Galerie), and puts Apple’s export to shame. Yes, Galerie is free.

Just as free is WebExport. Not as sassy, but offers good variety.

#1 - Photo Exports
Sharing is the name of Apple’s game these days as the iLife applications share media with one another. How about Flickr and Facebook and other web sites which let you share photos over the internet?

Facebook Exporter is utility for iPhoto which makes it easy to upload your digital photos so everyone can view and share. Ditto for the free Flickr Uploadr. There’s also Desk Lickr which lets you grab desktop images from Flickr. Different strokes for different folks.

iTunes and iPhoto are easily the most practical and appreciated utilities for Mac users. How does your iPhoto library stack up? Is it a mismangled bin that collects everything, or is it neatly arranged and organized? Share your experience in the Comments section below.

OK, so you use iPhoto. Do you use iTunes to manage your music? Click Here for the Top 6 iTunes Tools You Need To Have On Your Mac.

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Off Topic Note: Guess what? Former Mac360 writer Kate Mac is back online after dumping Windows and re-embracing the Mac. Again.