Hiding iPhotos

Once you start accruing a lot of photos in your iPhoto library or using it as a screensaver, you’ll probably notice that you start seeing photos you’d rather not see all the time.  Maybe you have 20 shots of your cat that are very similar and don’t want your scrolling through iPhoto or screen saver to be inundated by cat photos (as difficult as that may be for my cat to believe!), or maybe you’ve got some photos you’d rather not show off to anyone who happens to walk by while your screen saver is running or you’re scrolling through your iPhoto library.  Luckily, in iPhoto ‘08 there’s a quick way to fix this that doesn’t require deleting or moving any photos.

Here you see several photos of my cat at various levels of attentiveness.  My screensaver would be a little boring if these photos make up the majority of my iPhoto library, so I’ve decided I want to hide them from view.

First, I select the photos I’d like to hide (you can select multiple photos by holding the command key while you click on the photos you want), then press the “Hide” button you see magnified below.

Once you’ve hidden your photos, you will no longer be able to see them (obviously), but there will be a little message on the right top corner of the roll of photos they exist in letting you know that there are hidden photos there.

These photos are hidden from view during normal iPhoto browsing, and won’t show up in screen savers or rotating desktop images that pull from your iPhoto library but you can always view them again by clicking the spot where it says “Show 2 hidden photos.”  This will not “un-hide” them, but it will expose them temporarily in case you’d like to look through them.  You’ll notice below that my two hidden photos are being viewed, but have a little X on the top right corner to indicate thatthey are still hidden.

From here, you can either click “Hide 2 hidden photos” on the top right to re-hide them or you can select the hidden photos, and click the original “Hide” button in the bottom toolbar again to unhide them (when a hidden photo is selected, the “Hide” button magically becomes an “Unhide” button that allows you to stop the photo from being hidden.