iPhoto provides many great ways to organize photos for showing off the new photos of your favorite monkey to family and friends, but the continuous process of updating albums can be a little cumbersome: keeping track of which new photos have already been dragged into an album can get confusing and time consuming.  Fortunately there’s a simple way to keep all your photos organized using Keywords!

Keywords add identifying tags to photos to help us find them more easily.  To assign keywords to photos you should first make there’s a checkmark next to View>Keywords in the Menu Bar; next, go to Window>Show Keywords (Command+K).  Show Keywords will bring up a list of pre-existing keywords you’ve got in iPhoto already; most of these were probably built in to iPhoto when you got it.  We want to add some Quick Groups to help organize your photos; click the Edit Keyword button and then use our old friend the + Button to make new Keywords.  I have always recommended making a Keyword for each of your kids, your pets and, maybe, for places you’ve gone on vacation.  Once you’re done, click the OK button to return to the Keywords list.

Now, go through your iPhoto library and add keywords appropriately.  When you put your mouse over a picture, you’ll now notice a place to ‘add keywords’, click on that space and start typing in your keyword and iPhoto will fill it in for you based on your list of Keywords.  Too lazy to type?  Me too!  We can also add keywords by selecting one or more pics (remember the Shift and Command keys for multiple selections) and then just clicking the appropriate keyword in the Keyword window.  We’ll see it turn blue to let us know its been applied.  You can apply more than one Keyword to each photo, so if both kids and the dog on in the picture, apply all three Keywords.

Once you’ve applied all the Keywords you want or need, you can quickly look up those photos by using the Search field at the bottom of the screen.  Before searching, click on the little magnifying glass and choose Keyword instead, quickly move your mouse over the keyword buttons that pop up to keep them in view.  If you miss them the first time, its pretty quick, just click on Keywords again in that search field to get another try at it.  

Click on the Keyword you want to look up and iPhoto filters your library to only include that keyword.  You can also click multiple buttons to further filter your results.  For example, to show only photos of Dr. Zeus choose the Keyword with his name, to only show photos of him on vacation, choose both DR.ZEUS and VACATION keywords.

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