New to Mac: help me adjust my Windows workflow to iPhoto

Question

I recently switched to Mac, mostly in the hopes of spending less time thinking about how the computer works and more time doing what I want to do.
In fact, what made me finally start seriously thinking about a Mac is when I heard about the iPhoto '08 events feature, where it automatically split the photos based on the dates. I thought that was genius in how simple, yet effective it was.
I take quite a few photos. I take a lot of random photos of my car (I'm a car guy), but I also take some photos at parties, friend visits and family visits, etc. I often take several of photos of the same thing, because, heck, there's plenty of space on the memory card, and maybe one of the subsequent photos will be better than the first.
One common scenario for me is going to a social gathering of some kind and then posting the photos of that event online.
My Windows XP workflow used to be as follows:
1. Connect camera
2. Import photos into a folder named after the event using Windows Photo import. If several different events, select several sets and import them separately into separate folders. E.g. "My Pictures\Spring Cleaning Day Apr 2008"
3. Browse the photos using Windows File Viewer and delete any obviously poor photos and select the least blurry of several duplicates.
So that above is fairly straighforward. Now, I need to get these photos up online. A while back, I set up for myself a website that runs Gallery 1.x software, so I could just upload photos via a web interface and have them viewable with automatic thumbnails.
The thing is: I don't want to upload ALL images online. Just most of them (the best).
4. Open the photos I'm interested in a photo editor, one by one.
5. Crop, adjust levels, shadows, colors, etc.
6. Resize photo to a "large but not too large" web size, usually either 1200 or 1400 pixels wide.
7. Adjust sharpness on the resized photo to make sure it looks good when viewed at actual pixel size.
8. Save photo in a subfolder called "forweb", e.g. My Pictures\Spring Cleaning Day Apr 2008\forweb. This way, I get to keep all the originals from the camera and my resized web-ready photos separate.
9. Upload all photos from the "forweb" folder using a web interface, typing up descriptions for each.
When I'm done, I have a gallery that has thumbnails, mid-size versions of the photos (800 pixels wide, for easy viewing) and a "full-size" version for a detailed view (but not as huge as the one that came out of the camera... so it's not original size). In fact, the original size photos are huge (as I take them at 7.1MP resolution with the lowest compression), about 2-3MB each, and so I'd never want to upload a 100 3MB photos. A waste of space.
Overall, the result is pretty good: most people view the midsize photos and save full-size (1200 or 1400 pix wide) photos of things they particularly like.
However, the process is too time consuming. In particular, it takes forever to go through each photo and resize it and crop it. The process of resizing and saving each individual photo in the separate "forweb" is quite a bit of overhead. Sometimes I kind of dread having to post photos up online after events, and it should totally not be that way!
I bought a .Mac subscription after seeing the fancy web galleries. I am hoping that the combination of iPhoto and .Mac can help me get my photos up on the web quicker.
So now, the iPhoto workflow. What should it be?
Here's my guess:
1. Connect camera.
2. Import all photos, naming each event after importing.
3. Delete poor photos or blurry duplicates.
4. Identify photos I want to display on the gallery (those worth keeping) and hide all others.
5. Crop and adjust shadows/colors/etc.
6. Select "Web gallery" to share the event.
And then I'm done.
So that sounds pretty good right there. Except, I have several reservations and questions:
1. Is it better to mark photos I don't want in the web gallery as hidden (so I can just upload the entire gallery) or should I just select the photos I want to upload online into the web gallery? It seems to work either way. On one hand, it seems better to hide the photos, because then when they get synced to my iPhone, I have the most relevant photos and not the "extras." Also, if I'm showing photos from my laptop, I'm also showing the cream of the crop and not everything. On the other hand, the concept of hiding photos is kind of unusual to me. Feels strange to "hide" photos.
2. What to do for a web gallery full size that's not as huge as the original camera size? When uploading to .Mac, I only have an option of Optimized or Actual Size. Optimized size is 1024 pixels wide. That's too small for a detailed views or for wallpaper purposes. The problem is that the "Actual Size" from my camera is huge (~3000 pixels wide). I don't really want to burden people with the downloading of the 2-3MB "Actual Size."
However, it seems that it's tricky to implement such a 1200-1400-pixel-wide "full size" with iPhoto. There is no resize option within iPhoto that I could find. The best I could find was a crop with a constrain size option. I guess I would have to constrain-size crop to something like 1400x1000 first? And then crop again to get the shape I want?
Also, sharpness adjustment seems useless when adjusting 7MP photos. In my Windows workflow, I found sharpness much more useful when tweaking photos after they have been resized to this "full-size" 1200-1400 wide resolution. This again means that I'd have to do the crop "trick". It feels strange though that everything else is so straighforward, but resizing photos within iPhoto isn't.
I guess that's where the whole workflow question is. The iPhoto workflow is to keep your originals intact and maintain adjusted duplicates. But resizing is not a suggested part of this workflow--instead, it is expected that any resizing is done on the way "out" of the library (e.g. File->Export or web gallery publishing).
I wish I could introduce an intermediate "optimized" setting for Web Gallery upload (although then I don't have that precise control of sharpness after resizing).
Maybe I am overthinking this and, given that I have 10GB of storage space with .Mac, I should just give up and let it upload my 3000-pix wide 2-3MB JPG originals (i.e. use the "actual size" setting)?
3. Can anyone provide some practical uses for the "albums" setting and contrast their use vs events? I just want to get a better insight into the practical difference. It seems that albums are not very useful or rather would be rarely used, given the main categorization of all photos into events. It seems that the only use for albums would be to bring together photos across different events. For example, I could make an album of all of the photos of my car's odometer or put together my best random city shots. Maybe I just answered my own question? Still, interested into your use of albums.

Answer 1

ilp
Welcome to the Apple Discussions.
So now, the iPhoto workflow. What should it be?
This is pretty good:
1. Connect camera.
2. Import all photos, naming each event after importing.
3. Delete poor photos or blurry duplicates.
4. Identify photos I want to display on the gallery (those worth keeping) and hide all others.
Well I would make a small change here. There are reports of folks getting hidden photos turning up in their web galleries. So, instead I would flag the photos I want to upload and then create an ALBUM from them. (or you can just drag and drop them to an album) Also, you can add to your gallery simply by adding to the album. Or use Ratings and/or keywords, see below
5. Crop and adjust shadows/colors/etc.
6. Select "Web gallery" to share the event.
(or Album)
You cannot change the size of images that are in the Gallery. It's a flash based "movie". Those size options refer to the file size of images that you allow folks to download from the gallery.
Events are a really limited way of organising your pics. Events in the iPhoto Window correspond exactly with the Folders in the Originals Folder in the iPhoto Library package file (Right click on it in the Pictures Folder -> Show Package Contents).
You can move photos between Events, you can rename Events, edit them, create them, as long as you do it via the iPhoto Window. Check out the Info Pane (wee 'i', lower left) the name and date fields are editable. Edit a Event Name using the Info Pane, the Event Folder in iPhoto Library/Originals will also have the new name.
That's it.
Albums can be based on any criteria you can think of - and with Smart Albums this can be done automatically.
For instance, back in your work flow above, you sort the pic and hide the one's you don't want to upload. Here's another way of doing it. Rate the pics, from 1 - 5, and then
File -> New Smart Album
Rating -> Is -> 5 stars
will find your favourites. Best yet, it will update that album every time you rate new pics. You can base Smart Albums on a lot of criteria - date, rating, keyword, camera model... have a look and see the full list, and these can be combined together...
The other great plus with Albums is that, because they are virtual, a pic can be in 1, 10 or 100 albums with no wasted disk space. But if a pic is in more than one Event you're dealing with a duplicate file.
Frankly, a Event is a bucket of Pics, and Album is a coherent organisation based on any criteria you can think of.
Regards
TD