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   Streamed Advice for Managing Your Digital Photos

   Adam C. Engst

   Remember how, when Apple first introduced iPhoto, it was supposed to
   take over from the stereotypical shoebox in which we supposedly stored
   our photos? And initially, it did. But over time, as the number of
   digital photos we took increased, first quickly, then seemingly
   exponentially, iPhoto became less and less able to keep up. For many
   people, iPhoto has become just a virtual shoebox, where you import
   photos and ignore them.

   We have a solution for you, but like so many problems, the fix for this
   one is less about what tools you use and more about how you work. Don't
   get me wrong, choosing and configuring the right tool is important, and
   that's part of the overall approach that you'll learn from our senior
   editor [1]Jeff Carlson, who has become an award-winning photographer
   and author of popular photography books like '[2]The iPad for
   Photographers' over the past few years. But the key is learning the
   best methods of importing, culling, rating, and organizing your photos
   ' as automatically and effortlessly as possible ' and turning Jeff's
   real-world advice into habit.

   You're probably expecting that our solution will take the form of a
   Take Control ebook, and you'd be right, but we have something new for
   you too. Jeff's in the middle of writing 'Take Control of Your Digital
   Photos' right now, so you can't buy it yet, but you can start reading
   immediately. The introductory chapter of the book is available now for
   everyone at [3]'Take Control of Your Digital Photos,' Chapter 1, and
   we'll continue posting chapters as articles on the TidBITS Web site '
   call them 'chapticles' if you will ' each week as they're written and
   edited over the next 6 to 8 weeks.

   By the end, you'll have been able to read the entire book'¦ if you've
   joined [4]the TidBITS membership program. We've always provided TidBITS
   members with a 30-percent discount on all Take Control books and
   significant discounts on a wide variety of Mac software, but to make a
   TidBITS membership even more valuable, all TidBITS members will be able
   to read the entire book chapter by chapter, just like any other article
   (you need to be logged in to the TidBITS Web site with [5]your member
   account to see them). The only limitation is that links to other parts
   of the book won't be live, since those parts haven't yet been
   published.

   You can even leave comments on each chapter, just like any other
   TidBITS article, and in fact, we encourage you to do so! Jeff will
   respond directly and adjust the text of the book appropriately as the
   project continues, and we'll alert members to new chapters as we
   publish them. You can also opt to receive individual TidBITS articles
   in email, including these, as soon as they're published, by selecting
   the Receive All Articles checkbox in the member-only [6]Your
   Subscriptions page. The individual chapters will remain accessible on
   the TidBITS site indefinitely, and if you want the full book in classic
   Take Control PDF, EPUB, and Mobi form when we're done, the 30-percent
   member discount still applies.

   All this is possible thanks to some new production tools we're using, a
   combination of Nisus Writer Pro and a Markdown conversion macro written
   by Joe Kissell with the Leanpub publishing engine that turns that
   Markdown into EPUB, from which we can extract the nicely formatted HTML
   you'll see in each chapter online. (The TidBITS Publishing System uses
   Markdown natively too, but we get more formatting flexibility by
   relying on the HTML extracted from EPUB.) The system is simultaneously
   elegant and baroque, but it's been a lot of fun to build. We hope you
   like the results!

References

   1. http://jeffcarlson.com/
   2. http://ipadforphotographers.com/
   3. http://tidbits.com/article/13883
   4. http://tidbits.com/member_benefits.html
   5. http://tidbits.com/account
   6. http://tidbits.com/subscriptions

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