Looking for shots taken with a particular camera? Let iPhoto do it for you!

What You’ll Need:

>> iPhoto
>> 10 Minutes

Difficulty: Medium

Digital cameras save a wide variety of shooting data when you take a picture, and it’s embedded invisibly in the image as ‘EXIF’ data. iPhoto can use this in a variety of ways. For example, it uses the date saved by the camera to sort photos chronologically. But there’s a lot more information in there that you can use to find your photos quickly, and without having to resort to manual keywords or albums.

You can see some of the shooting settings embedded in your digital photos by selecting one and opening the Info panel. At the top, iPhoto displays the camera model, shutter speed, aperture setting, ISO, white balance setting and more. You can type any of these into the iPhoto search box and it’ll find matching photos, but it’ll probably find a lot more besides since it’s also checking keywords, titles and descriptions.

But there is a way to directly access and use camera shooting data within iPhoto in a very specific way – smart albums. Smart albums are different to the regular sort. With normal albums, you add photos manually. But smart albums are filled automatically by iPhoto based on specific conditions you set up. Think of them as ‘saved searches’.

And while iPhoto’s search box is pretty indiscriminate, smart albums enable you to be extremely precise about the data you’re looking for and what constitutes a ‘match’. This can be very useful if you’re trying to find specific photos, or at least narrow down the list you have to look through. Our walkthrough shows a typical example, where the smart album’s been set up to display highly rated high-ISO shots taken with a Sony R1 camera.

In fact, you can use the camera settings in a more lateral way to find photos with particular visual properties. For example, if you want pictures with shallow depth of field (creative background blur), you could create a smart album with a wide lens aperture as one of its conditions, and maybe longer focal lengths too. The EXIF shooting data embedded in your digital images is a mine of useful information when you’re looking for specific photos, and smart albums are the tool you need for exploiting it. And this data is already there, waiting to be used.

Smart Album Creation

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How to Find Photos Using Camera Data in iPhoto

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  1. Create a New Smart Album

  Create a new smart album using the File > New menu. Give your new smart album a name then set the first condition. Smart albums are created with one condition by default, but you can add more. We’ll choose Camera Model from the menu.

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  2. Choose a Camera

  The middle menu chooses how the condition is matched; in this case it can be left set to ‘is’. The right menu lists all the cameras used to take the photos in the library. iPhoto gets this information from the EXIF data in each photo. Scroll down the list and select a camera.

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  3. Extra Conditions

  The previous step finds all the shots taken with that camera, but what if you want to be more specific? Add another condition by clicking the ‘+’ button to the right of the first one; this gives you another row of three drop-down menus. We’ll choose ISO to search for.

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  4. Matching Conditions

  The options in the second and third menus change according to the property you choose in the first one. We’ve chosen ISO as the property, so we can choose specific values for the ISO, values greater or smaller than a specific value, or values that lie within a certain range.

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  5. Choosing Values

  The list of values in the third menu shows the list of values used by your photos. We want to look for photos taken at ISO settings above 400 – you’ll see that the three menus in the condition have been designed to be read as a simple phrase: ‘ISO is greater than 400’.

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  6. Mixing Conditions

  Carry on adding as many conditions as you like to narrow the search – they don’t have to relate to camera data. We’ve a condition, ‘My Rating is greater than 3 stars’, which restricts the contents of the album to 3-star and above shots, taken with Sony R1 at ISO 400 and above.

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  7. Matching ‘All’ Conditions

  If you want smart albums to be highly specific, check the status of the small drop-down Match menu at the top-left of the smart album panel. This should be set to all, so that the album only displays photos that match all of the conditions. This is the default setting.

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  8. Matching ‘Any’ Conditions

  If you set this drop-down menu to any, the smart album will work differently. Here, we’ve used it to create a smart album that displays photos taken on any one of a number of Sony digital SLRs. We must set up a condition for each one, but it only needs doing once.

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  Quick Tip

  You can accumulate so many smart albums that they disappear off the bottom of the source panel and you have to scroll down to see them. The way round this is to organize your albums into folders – you’ll find the command on the File>New menu.

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