It’s easy to confuse iPhoto events and albums. After all, they both contain batches of photos.
But that’s where any similarity ends.
- Events store your original images. If you delete a photo from an event… it’s gone.
- Albums are created from copies of images pulled from events. Photos can be added or deleted from an album with no impact on the original image.
Events are the primary storage space where iPhoto keeps your images. Every time you bring photos into iPhoto these images are split into events based on the date they were created.
It’s a good idea to keep events as organized as possible. Remember that you can quickly split, merge and rename events.
Make a habit of cleaning up events each time you import new images from your camera or iPhone.
You’ll encounter iPhoto events when you add images to iMovie, iDVD, Pages, Keynote, Numbers and when you sync a device with iTunes. Without some basic organization, it’s very hard to locate the images you want.
Albums are a simply another method of enjoying your images. They work exactly the same way as a playlist.
You create an album, then add and organize the content any way you like.
Nothing that you do with an album has any impact on the original image. It’s safe to move, duplicate and delete images, the same way you might rearrange music in a playlist.
I hope this helps.
I’ve just transferred a vacation’s worth of photos from cards to my computer. For some reason, I have a family reunion album with 993 photos in it, but no corresponding event. Do I need the event? Can I recreate an event? As long as I have the photos in an album, I don’t care if I have an event, but it seems weird. And should I care? Sorry. It’s so confusing to me.
Monique
Hi Monique
Events are created automatically by iPhoto when photos are imported. Events are generally organized by date.
Events contain the original images. If you delete the photos from an event, they end up in the iPhoto trash.
Albums are like playlists, you can delete them and it has no impact on the original image.
Unless there is some huge database bug with your iPhoto, you cannot have albums that contain photos that are not in events.
My bet is that if you go carefully through the events you will find the original photos.
Remember Events = Original Photos and Albums = Selected copies of original photos. You need the events.
Hope this helps. thanks for reading.
John
Thanks for clarification above.
So how do Events and Photos differ (two headings under Library)?
Hi Louisa – Events are photos grouped by day or manually under a particular name. Photos shows all photos in the library in a continuous stream. Photo’s are sorted by name, rating, keywords or date by choosing a Sort option from the view menu. Like events, if you delete a photo from Photos it is moved to the Trash. – John
Really hope you can help. Someone deleted all my facebook albums (thousands of photos) uploaded from IPhoto. When I tried to upload a new album to Facebook, it notified me of the deletions, album by album, but it asked if I wanted to save the album as an event in IPhoto. In an attempt to recover the photos I clicked yes, but it appears that only the first photo from each previously-uploaded facebook album was saved as a new event in IPhoto. Is there anyway to recover the rest of the photos from each album as they were originally structured? I understand that I still have the originals of all the photos, but the facebook albums were subsets of those on which I had spent hours and hours putting together over the last 6 years!! Is there any hope???
Hi Ellen – Do you have a Time Machine backup? – John
This was so clear. Thanks!
Should I ALWAYS trust that photos appearing in ALBUMS have a copy (the original) in the EVENTS category. I’d love to erase all my albums. What I really want to accomplish is a random streaming of my photos to my tv Monitor. I understand the device wil not stream from both EVENTS and ALBUMS. An APPLE tech guy told me that. Is that true!?
Sorry for the delayed response. You can delete you albums in iPhoto with no concern that it will impact the originals in Events. And Yes, that is true, you can’t stream from both Albums and Events on the Apple TV at the same time. All the best – John
How do I copy each Album onto an external hard disk?
Thanks
Catherine
You can’t, in the traditional sense. You need to go into the album, use the File > Export command, save the photos to your desktop in a folder you name the same as the album, then burn that folder onto a disk.
Thank you so much – I have been fighting with this for days and researched extensively – your reply is simple and timely … THANK YOU
Awesome. Glad it worked 🙂 John
Hello,
On my mac, when I click on Albums in the topbar (or “command 3” to bring me to Albums) it only shows those Albums (or iEvents) that I made 2 years ago and before.
For example one month ago I made the album “Dubai”. It does not appear in the “Albums” folder. It is only when I search “Dubai” that it appears.
I have made 20 plus new albums and this is the issue. Where are they hiding?
I am worried they will all delete if my current iPhone’s iCloud is disconnected from the laptop.
Thanks for the help!!!
Elizabeth 🙂
Sorry for the delay in responding. I’ve been trying to figure out the problem based on what you wrote. It’s simply something too complex to do through comments. I would a) Go the Genius Bar or b) Call Apple Support and have them do a screen share. – John C