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With a double click, any iPhoto library can be open on your screen.
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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983
T h e R o a d L e s s T r a v e l e d
iPhoto Library Manager gives iPhoto amazing flexibility
Nov. 2, 2005
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, The Post-Standard
Apple tried to make iPhoto as foolproof as possible, but that meant the software had to be dumbed down in a couple of ways. The best example -- perhaps I should say the worst example -- is the way iPhoto seems to limit users to one library.
All your pictures end up in one big place in iPhoto. It's the ubiquitous Library, represented by an icon at the top of the library pane. (That's the vertical window at the left of iPhoto. If someone has turned your library pane off, it's just hiding; look for a small dot in the middle of the vertical divider and drag that dot to the right to show the pane again.)
Unless you've deleted photos from it, the iPhoto Library is a collection of all the pictures you ever put into iPhoto. The library also stores folders, if you create them. (But remember, iPhoto fans: Pictures in library folders are just aliases to ones in the main library, so deleting them from the folders doesn't take them out of the library. You have to track them down in the library folder and delete them there.)
The problem with this scheme should be clear to anyone who's tossed old coats, hats and boots into a hall closet. Sooner or later, you end up with a storage space that's too full; you can't find things, and you might even have duplicates. (Don't laugh. I once bought the same boots twice because I couldn't find the ones I already had. They showed up, of course, a few weeks after I paid for a second pair.)
There are many ways to make iPhoto behave better. You can manually prune out your unwanted photos, making sure you delete them from the library itself, not simply from any folders you have. You can go to all the trouble of exporting just the photos you want to save, putting them in a folder, then importting them back into iPhoto after deleting the entire library (and, of course, emptying the iPhoto trash).
Or you can pick up a copy of iPhoto Library Manager and make life easy on yourself. It's delightfully free if you don't mind a few restrictions on what it will do. My suggestion is to pay the required fee -- only $20 -- to get the full version. Among other outstanding features available only in the paid version is something that turns iPhoto into iWonderfulPhoto: You can create shortcuts that launch specific iPhoto libraries. With a double click, any iPhoto library can be open on your screen.
The premise of iPhoto Library Manager, as you probably suspect, is to allow you to have many different iPhoto Libraries. You run the program and choose which one you want -- one with all the pictures of the kids, one with all your vacation photos and so on. These libraries are kept entirely separate, and as a result iPhoto runs faster and you find your pictures without a single bit of trauma.
iPhoto Library Manager is the work of Brian Webster, a young programmer from Houston. You can download it from his site at http://homepage.mac.com/bwebster.
The program's documentation is thorough and easy to follow, so I won't expand on it here. But I do have a tip that's not covered in Webster's otherwise excellent help files. It concerns the shortcuts you can make for the separate libraries.
When you drag library listings out onto your desktop or into a folder to make shortcuts, you can't actually run them without getting iPhoto Manager into the act. It pops up in your face and gets in the way. To prevent this, simply run iPhoto Manager once and then minimize it. (Press Cmd-M. That will do it nicely.) When you double click a shortcut to an iPhoto Library, the Library Manager will stay out of the way.
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