One of best things about each computer sold by Apple is that its standard software offering includes a version of iLife. One of the best and most used applications in iLife is iPhoto. It has been an essential part of iLife and is one of the tools that make managing your digital media quick and easy on a Mac.

Although iPhoto comes with many great features, it never hurts to enhance its capabilities with a few tools and plugins. Below are 5 great plugins and tools that will help you get the most out of iPhoto.

1. Picasa Web Albums Exporter

We’ve mentioned before that Picasa Web Albums Uploader for iPhoto provides users with a quick and easy way to share photos in with friends and family. This is especially useful if you’re not a MobileMe user. Head over to Google’s Mac section to grab the plugin and install it to quickly and easily upload selected pictures from your iPhoto Library.

2. Duplicate Annihilator

If you’re anything like me, then you’ve been keeping a digital photo library for years. I know my library has moved across a number of computers, operating systems, and platforms and that somewhere along the way I’ve created a duplicate or many.

Duplicate Annihilator is a tool that will look through your photos and determine those that are duplicates. It also gives you a number of different options of what to do with the duplicate files. Running the tool to help clean up your photo collection will speed up iPhoto and make browsing through your pictures more enjoyable.

3. Free Flickr eXporter

FFXPorter is a Free Flickr eXporter plugin for iPhoto that will allow you to quickly upload and add descriptions to your Flickr account. If you’re a big web 2.0 user and have your own social network on Flickr, sharing your photos has never been easier.

Like Picasa Web Albums Exporter you can select the photos in iPhoto and upload the selection to your Flickr account. The Photos will upload and be accessible by your Flickr contacts.

4. GrowlPhoto

GrowlPhoto is a plugin that adds iPhoto notifications to Growl. If you’re not already using Growl, you’ve been missing out on quick and un-intruding system notifications.

GrowlPhoto will let you know when your large photo imports have finished and are ready for you to work with. This will make it easy for you to do other tasks on your computer while you wait for your imports to finish.

5. Facebook Exporter for iPhoto

Like FFXPorter and Picasa Web Albums, Facebook Exporter for iPhoto allows you to quickly share your photos with your friends and contacts. This plugin makes exporting photos directly to Facebook quick and easy.

The plugin includes the ability to add captions, tag your friends, and write a description of the pictures you’re uploading to your Facebook site. After you’ve uploaded your pictures they’ll be included in your Facebook photo section and ready for your friends to see.

Conclusion

Many of the plugins for iPhoto focus on making it easy to share your pictures with others. As the internet continues to expand and social networks become stronger through internet tools these type of plugins make use of iPhoto that much more enjoyable and useful.

What plugins and tools do you use with iPhoto?

If you’ve ever wanted to quickly browse your iPhoto library to drag and drop photos to another application but wanted to do so with out opening iPhoto itself… than this Automator tip is for you.

To create an iPhoto Library browser that can be accessed system wide:

1. Open Automator
2. Select Photos from your Action Library
3. Drag Action - Ask for Photos to your workflow

Now that you’ve created your automator workflow you need to setup your system so that you can quickly access the iPhoto Library Browser throughout OS X.

1. Save your workflow as plug-in (Save As Plugin-in) as a plugin for Script Menu
2. Open AppleScript Utility from your Applications folder
3. Check “Show Script Menu in Menu Bar” - This will add a Script icon to your menu bar that you can access saved scripts from

Now that you’ve created the iPhoto Library Browser script and added the Script Menu to your menu bar you can quickly and easily open your iPhoto library any time you need to access pictures but without having to open iPhoto itself.

From here you can find your pictures and drag and drop them to the location or application of your choice.

*Note - Selecting the pictures and clicking the Choose button will do nothing - you must drag and drop the photos to the location or Application of your choice. *

- Tip found @ macosxhints.com

iPhoto is a great application for managing your digital photos. The update to the latest version of iPhoto including Events has only made the application more enticing to potential Mac users. The ability to quickly add and share photos with other applications and other users has been a strong point of iPhoto.

But if you don’t have your own .Mac account or iWeb site sharing your photo’s from iPhoto to friends and family may require a bit of outside assistance. One option to quickly share photo albums with others is through using Google’s free Picasa Web Albums.

Picasa Web Albums is available to anyone with a Google Account. Once your account has been setup, you can upload your photos and share the album urls with others.

To make this process a bit easier, Google has provided a plugin to iPhoto to make exporting photo albums that much easier. After downloading and installing Picasa Web Albums Uploader for your Mac open iPhoto, select the photos or album you’d like to share and then click File, followed by Export.

Once the export window has opened, click the Picasa Web tab. From here you can name the Album you’re uploading, write a brief description, and decide if the album is one you’d like to share with the public or keep private to just those you select to share with.

After defining the options for you soon to be shared album, click export and enter your Google Account credentials. The photos will then be uploaded to your free Google Picasa Web Album site and allow others to view and download the pictures you’ve shared.

Picasa Web Albums + iPhoto is a great way to share photos with friends and family. Additionally, Picasa Web Albums look great on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

With iPhoto 08 Apple included a number of enhancements and adjustments to the way that users view their photo library in iPhoto. Instead of having one library that stored all your photos, there are now divided up by Events.

I personally have found this a great enhancement to the organization capabilities of iPhoto. It was becoming more and more difficult to find the photos I was looking for and I wasn’t a big fan of needing to create an Album for each set of pictures I wanted to keep together.

Events solved that problem for me. And with that solution they also provide a way to keep those events organized in a way that makes the most sense to you.

Sort Events in iPhoto

If you aren’t satisfied with the way that iPhoto sorted your photos into events after the initial upgrade to iPhoto 08 then follow these few steps to get things organized just the way you want them:

1. Open iPhoto 08 and select Events
2. On the menu bar select View and then Sort Events
3. From there you can select to sort by Date, Keyword, Title, Rating, or Manually. Additionally you can mark the sort Ascending or Descending.

Select the Event Picture

Now that you have the events organized the way you like, you may want to add a final touch to each event so that it really represents the pictures all grouped together.

Move your mouse from horizontally across the event to quickly browse the pictures included. Stop when you find the picture that you feel represents the event the best and hit the SPACE BAR. This will instantly mark that picture as the picture to display for the event.