With the Autosplit option, you can get iPhoto to do your organizing for you

Do you actually use all the Events iPhoto creates for all the photos you import? The idea is quite a good one because, in theory, your photos will be grouped together into, well, ‘Events’; and because they’re displayed as tiles, it should be easier to scroll through and find the pictures you want.

But what if you’re not particularly organized about the way you take pictures, and don’t get round to importing them until you’ve got several days’ or weeks’ worth? They don’t belong together, but iPhoto lumps them into a single Event simply because you imported them all in one go. You can manually split and reorganize these Events later on, but will you actually bother?

The answer lies in the Autosplit option. You can only use it when you import pictures from a device (though you can apply it to existing Events after the fact), but it makes a big difference to the way iPhoto creates Events and how useful they are afterwards.
It works by using the date and time information embedded in your images to split your photos into separate, date-based Events rather than lumping them all into one.

You can Autosplit photos into groups of pictures taken within the same day, within the same week or, interestingly, according to how big a gap there is between them. For example, if you’ve just come back from a week in the Caribbean, you might decide you want all your holiday photos imported into a single Event. If, however, you did a little traveling, you could Autosplit them by day, so that you get an Event for each day of your holidays. Or, if you visited several attractions each day, you could specify gaps of eight hours or two hours between them. In this case, iPhoto will create a new Event every time there’s an eight-hour or a two-hour gap between batches of photos. This works really well, and the Events iPhoto creates will be much more useful because they’re far more likely to cover single, specific subjects.

You might sometimes need to do a little manual rearranging afterwards, but you’ll find it’s a lot quicker with Events that are already largely sorted out than it would be if you were starting from scratch.

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Use iPhoto’s Autosplit Feature

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  Set Autosplit Preferences

  The Autosplit options are in the General tab of iPhoto’s preferences. The settings you choose are applied to photos imported directly from memory cards or cameras connected to the Mac; they’ll also apply to any existing Events that you Autosplit via the Events menu.

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  Import from a Device

  There are two ways to import photos: use the File > Import to Library command to browse for photos in a Finder window; or connect a camera/insert a memory card and it will show up under Devices. The latter offers the Autosplit checkbox (bottom).

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  Imported Events

  When iPhoto has finished importing, it displays the new photos in separate, untitled Events (select Last Import in the source panel). These are split according to the settings in the Preferences panel. If they’ve not been split the way you want, it’s time to put it right...

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  Name Events

  First, it’s a good idea to give your Events names to make them easier to recognize later. It’s useful to remember that Events also have a date property set by the photos they contain. You don’t have to order them using alphabetical titles, or include the date in the Event title.

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  Move Photos Manually

  Although splitting photos by date makes sense, you want to organize pictures by subject matter. While all the "split" Events are still visible, you can drag photos from one Event to another. Here, four images from a "Moody landscapes" Event are being dragged into "Close ups" below.

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  Sort Events

  Once you’ve named Events, you have a choice about the order they’re displayed in: alphabetically by title, or by date. Alternatively, simply drag Events into different positions to sort them manually (though you’ll lose this if you choose a different sort order later).

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  Merge Events

  You can change the contents of Events at any time. For example, to merge two Events, simply drag one on to the other. The Event you’re dragging will be merged into the one you drag it onto, and the merged Event will now have an extended date range to match.

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  Split Events Manually

  You can select and Autosplit an Event manually via the Event menu. Use this to split Events already in your iPhoto library, and those imported using the File > Import to Library command. You could even merge all existing Events into one and then Autosplit that…

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  Quick Tip

  iPhoto relies heavily on the time and date embedded by the camera in your photos’ EXIF data. If this is wrong, you can fix it by selecting the affected photos and using the Photos > Batch change command, and typing in the correct date/time.

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