iPhoto lets you store all your pictures in one place, called the iPhoto Library. iPhoto gives you five ways to view and organize the pictures in your library:
Events
Photos
Albums
Faces
Places
Events represent a fixed period of time, such as one day. Using the date on which each picture was taken, iPhoto automatically organizes your pictures into events, where, for example, one event might represent all the pictures you took on July 24 and a second event might represent all the pictures you took on September 20, as shown in Figure 27-1.
Think of events as iPhoto's way of storing your pictures into separate piles. When you want to view your pictures, you can double-click the event, and iPhoto shows you only the pictures stored in that event.
Much like laying out all your pictures on the living room floor so you can see them, iPhoto lets you view and scroll through your pictures onscreen, so you can see every picture you have stored. However, if you have stored a lot of pictures and you're looking for a particular shot, you'll have to browse through each picture, one by one, until you find the one you want.
Albums let you organize related pictures and store them together, regardless of the date on which you captured them. So, for example, one album might contain airplane pictures, a second album might contain pictures of your dog, and a third album might contain all your summer vacation pictures. Albums let you organize pictures based on your specific criteria.
Two additional ways iPhoto organizes pictures are Faces and Places. Faces organizes photos by the faces that appear in each picture. So if you have several pictures of your uncle or girlfriend, iPhoto can automatically identify and organize any picture that contains your uncle or girlfriend's face.
Places organizes pictures based on the location where you took them. So if you have pictures of a dog, a building, and a person that were all taken in San Francisco, iPhoto lumps those pictures together, even if your dog picture was taken in July 2008 and your building picture was taken in February 2009.