Exploring and Browsing Places

The real payoff to specifying locations for your photos comes later—when you want to browse and search for photos. By clicking the Places item in the Library list, you can explore your world in a couple of ways. Use the map view to display a Google map that contains marker pins showing where you’ve taken photos. Zoom in to see a street-by-street view, or zoom out for the big picture. Want to see the photos that you took at a particular place? Click its pin.

You can also browse your geotagged photos by category. Step back for the big picture: “Show me all the photos I’ve taken in California.” Or drill down to a specific area: “Let’s see the photos I’ve taken in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood.”

Browsing is an excellent way to appreciate iPhoto’s “smarts” when it comes to geography. The pop-up menus at the top-left of the map show how places relate to each other: for example, the North Beach neighborhood is in San Francisco, which is in California, which is in the United States.