IPhoto sync only starred photos?

Question

does anybody can give me a hint on how to achieve directly, without creating a Smart Album, that only starred photos will be sync'd between iPhoto/Leopard and my iPod?

Answer 1

In iTunes, the music is mangaged by iTunes, you have a library of music/videos and iTunes manages it for you. This is why you can check the songs, because it's part of iTunes management features.
For syncing photos, you have a different arrangement. The manager for your photos is Aperture.
What iTunes provides is a conduit into your photo library, but Aperture is your manager for that library. In short, what it means is you have to do the mangagement in Aperture and then iTunes can hook into what you have done.
You have currently latched onto the 'flag' as equivalent of the 'check'. This is a bad idea, because flags are incredibly useful for transient (temporary) management tasks, and if you assign a permanent meaning to them you lose the benefits of this transient usage.
For permanent meaning you have a load of other metadata at your disposal that is better suited to the task. For example you could use a blue label for those you want to share via iTunes. Then create a smart album of all your images with a blue label.
Your existing flags will come in useful here. You could list all your flagged images using the flagged shortcut in the inspector. CMD + A to select them all, then CMD + 5 to assign a blue lable to them. You can then hit the '/' key to rest the flag. As you import new images you can flag the ones for sharing, then repeat the above to assign blue labels for just the new images. This is a good example of the transient usage of flags.
To give yourself more flexibility about what you can select in iTunes, follow Williams advice, create folders/albums/smart albums for the images you want to use on the iPad and then select just those in iTunes.
Assigning metadata to images for organising is a huge strength of Aperture, you'll be better off using it to your advantage rather than wanting to bend iTunes to your will. It wont happen, iTunes is not your photo manager.
Andy