I recently bought a Macbook Pro to replace my Dell laptop that was having major hard drive issues. The Macbook came with Apple’s photo cataloging software, iphoto. There’s a more advanced version of iphoto called Aperture, but I haven’t felt the need to try it yet.

I have been doing a lot of work on my website “behind the scenes” with iphoto. With iphoto, you can catalog all of your photos, add descriptions to them, etc. I have about 20,000 photos – yes, you read that right, I have 20,000 photos just of the Gettysburg battlefield! – that I’ve taken over the past seven years at Gettysburg. Using the catalog system through iphoto has made sorting this huge collection easy.

What is particularly cool about iphoto going forward is that you can create what are called “Smart Albums” that include photos using different criteria. So for example, you can set up a Smart Album that includes the description “5th New Hampshire” and it will bring up all the photos of the 5th New Hampshire. It will also include all NEW photos added with that description, making it much easier to keep organized.

I am still working with getting my monument project organized into iphoto, but I am definitely loving it as an organizational tool. It makes me happy I decided to get the Mac and not another PC.