Edit multiple photos in iPhoto

iPhoto on the Mac has some excellent editing facilities for enhancing photographs, fixing faults like brightness, saturation, contrast and so on. The usual way to edit a photo is to either double click it or to selected it and click Edit, but there is another way to edit photos and multiple images can be selected and edited simultaneously.

Open iPhoto and browse your photos as thumbnail images in the usual way. If there are two, three or four photos next to each other that you want to edit, click the first one to select it, then hold down the Shift key and click the last one. This selects them all. If the photos are not adjacent to each other, click the first one, hold down the Command key and click the second. Add a third and fourth in the same way if you want to edit up to four photos. Each time a Command+click adds to the selection.

After selecting two or more photos, click the Edit button in the bottom right corner of iPhoto. All the images are displayed. You can select an image by clicking it and then use the editing and enhancement functions in the usual way. Adjustments to each of the photos is remembered and you'll see the settings change as you switch from one photo to the other.

It can be an advantage to edit multiple photos this way when you want to make them all look the same, such as for an online gallery, a slide show or presentation. When the images are side by side it is easier to adjust the contrast, brightness, saturation and other factors to make them look identical. If you edited the photos individually they could look slightly different and you might not notice.