IPHOTO ALBUM vs. EVENT

iPhoto is one of the popular application software available for the Apple operating system. It is a very intuitive and user-friendly application that allows one to readily edit and organize their stored digital images and photos. Even the ‘newbie’ editor can easily navigate through the various options available. In using the iPhoto interface, one of the most common elements that confuse a new user is the difference between an album and an event. In order to fully understand the difference between an iPhoto album and event, a brief overview of the application must be made.

iPhoto is actually part of the iLife suite of applications included in every PC produced by Macintosh since the early part of 2002. It allows a user to import images from different sources, whether they are scanned, burned from a CD, downloaded from the net or directly from a digital camera. iPhoto can recognize and utilize the most common image file formats available in the market (i.e. .bmp, .jpg, .png, etc.). While it is a very useful image editing software, it does not offer extensive options as others of its kind like Adobe Photoshop or Apple’s own Aperture application. When organizing the images, iPhoto has 2 options: Events and Albums.

An event in iPhoto refers to a specific series of images that were uploaded at a certain date and time. For instance, you can import the images from your birthday and then give it a title ‘MY BIRTHDAY.’ The application will then compile all the uploaded images in a folder under that name. It will not make any discrimination on the images you upload for that point in time. The archive created for these images at that specific time of upload is an ‘Event.’ One point that should be remembered is that if a user does not create a new event, the application will default to the last event that was used. Furthermore, all the images in events will be accessible through the image library that the application provides. iPhoto events allow the user to have an effective organization for the images in the drive.

On the other hand, an iPhoto album is something the user creates to segregate the images from the events. Say, for example, I wanted to compile photos from the ‘MY BIRTHDAY’ event as well as images from the ‘MY FIRST DATE’ and ‘MY GAME’ events into a single grouping so I can easily upload them to the social networking site I prefer, I would create an iPhoto album. An empty album would be created by clicking on the ‘new album’ command. I could then fill it out by selecting the images I needed and dragging them to the album. However, these images are not copied into the album. They are still part of the event they were ‘pulled’ from. Once in the album, a user can incorporate keywords and ratings into the images. This allows one to easily sort through the different images when they are needed.

One thing that is critical to remember is about deleting images. If you delete an image in an iPhoto album, the image is still in the drive. What you simply did in this case is remove the image from the album. As mentioned before, an image in an album is not a copy. It is the same image as it is in the event it came from. It allows you to access the image without the use of any additional memory from the drive itself. However, if you delete an image in the iPhoto event, it is gone for good and is also removed from the library and any albums it was included in. This is the main difference between an iPhoto album and event.

To summarize:

1.An iPhoto event is an archive of the images uploaded from the source at a specific point and time. An iPhoto album is created by the user to organize the images in events depending on their preference.

2.Images in iPhoto events take up space from the drive. Images in the iPhoto albums are the same images in the events; they are not copies.

3.Removing images from an iPhoto album simply removes it from the album; images removed from an iPhoto event are permanently deleted from the memory.

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