SAN FRANCISCO – A reader who prefers to be known by the initials L.N. has a question about iPhoto sorting. He or she writes:

I am writing to ask if there is any way to change the way Apple iPhoto events behave when sorted by date. Specifically, iPhoto sorts events by date based on the oldest date in the event, and I’d prefer sorting based on the most recent date in the event.

This is one of those “Really, it’s as simple as that?” answers. But it’s a question I’ve never considered before so I guess until you explore your options, you wouldn’t know.

To sort photos within events you undoubtedly know that you choose View -> Sort Photos and choose one of the options–Date, Keyword, Title, or Rating. The default setting is Date. Below these options are Ascending and Descending entries. These are the key to sorting photos by oldest or newest within the event. Choose Ascending and the oldest photos within the event appear at the top of the event pane. Choose Descending, and the newest photos appear at the top.

These Ascending and Descending commands work similarly with iPhoto albums.

SAN FRANCISCO – An anonymous Hints reader was flummoxed: He (or she) used iTunes to sync pictures from iPhoto to his (or her) iPhone. But when he looked at the pictures on his phone, iPhoto Events didn’t appear in the order he wanted. As far as he could tell, neither iTunes nor the iPhone offered any option to change the phone’s photo-sorting behavior.

As the anonymous reader discovered, however, there is a solution–one that’s less obvious than it might appear at first. The iPhone will honor whichever sorting option you select within iPhoto. To change the sorting order there, launch iPhoto, select Events, and then choose View -> Sort Events. You can then sort Events by date (in chronological or reverse-chronological order), alphabetically by name, or in a manual order of your own creation.

But, wait, there’s more: If you switched to iTunes now, your photos still wouldn’t be in the order you wanted; they’d be out of order on your phone, too. You must first quit and relaunch iPhoto. Once you’ve done so, iTunes will notice the new sort order you’ve set for your Events. When you sync your iPhone this time, events will appear the way you want them to.

SAN FRANCISCO – Macworld forum visitor skfx4 faces the daunting job of identifying faces. He writes:

I just upgraded to iPhoto 11 and now have the dubious task of assigning face names to 24,000 faces in my iPhoto library. Does anyone know of any shortcuts to this process?

iPhoto’s magical powers go only so far. But that doesn’t mean that when identifying faces in your images you have to click every single image and name it. It works like this:

After you’ve imported your images, iPhoto will set about identifying faces in your library. It obviously can’t assign names at this point, but it can separate human faces from random patterns on a tortilla. Select Faces in iPhoto’s Library pane and you can watch it work through your images, displaying faces it finds as it goes.

When it’s completed the job, you’ll see a collection of faces on a cork-board background with “Unnamed” appearing beneath each image. Highlight one of these fields and enter the name of the person in the image. Repeat for the other images on the cork-board. If you like, click Show More Faces and you’ll see other faces from your library. Enter their names as well. When you’re ready for serious naming, click Continue to Faces.

This screen will show one picture of each face you’ve identified. Double-click on one of those faces and you’ll see the entire image the face came from. Now, here’s where the shortcut comes into play. At the bottom of the window you’ll see a Bubba May Be in 46 Additional Photos entry (where Bubba is only Bubba if you know and have named a Bubba). Click the Confirm Additional Faces button at the bottom of the window.

This is where the magic happens. iPhoto has made its best guess about which of your images contain Bubba’s mug. At the top of the window is the one image you’ve named and confirmed. Below are unconfirmed faces. Beneath each is a Click to Confirm entry. If you were to click each of 24,000 images, you would set yourself on the short path to insanity. So don’t.

Instead, click and drag across contiguous images of Bubba. When you do so, each image is assigned that name. If iPhoto’s done its job properly (and honestly, it’s pretty good), far more faces will be Bubba’s than another person’s. Alternatively, if nearly all the faces are Bubba’s drag across all the images and then just click those that aren’t Bubba to reject them. If you’ve chosen the first method, before clicking Done, be sure to Option-click those faces that don’t belong to Bubba. This helps with iPhoto’s identification as well. If you find an incorrectly named face that you’d like to name, Control (right) click on the image, choose Name from the menu, and enter the correct name. If you’ve already named this person, their name should appear when you’ve typed the first couple of letters.

When you click Done, you’ll return to Bubba’s page where you’ll likely see another entry at the bottom indicating that Bubba may be in additional photos. Your first training has helped iPhoto identify subsequent images of Bubba. Click Confirm Additional Faces and repeat the previous process. You may find that you have to do this a few times before you’re no longer prompted to identify Bubba in other images.

Once you’ve finished with Bubba, continue on with other faces. I understand that this sounds like a tedious process, but when you invoke the power of selecting multiple images, the job gets a heck of a lot easier. And it’s not something you need to do in one sitting. In those minutes when your Mac is tied up doing other things–downloading a movie from the iTunes Store or processing iPhoto thumbnails in iMovie–dash over to iPhoto and spend a few minutes identifying faces. A few of these sessions and your work will be done.

SAN FRANCISCO – Mac OS X Hints reader tchenj discovered that, if you have one of Apple’s new gesture-friendly trackpads, it can make editing in iPhoto ’11 (or ’09) easier. For example:

Open a photo in iPhoto and click on Edit. Now select the Straighten tool. With the mouse cursor on the image and two fingers on the trackpad, rotate left or right to fine-tune the tilt.

Or select the Crop tool and turn on constrain. Now, with the mouse cursor over the image, pinch inwards to shrink the crop frame while retaining the original aspect ratio; move your fingers apart, and the crop frame gets bigger. If you move both fingers around without pinching or spreading, the crop frame will move without changing size. (Unless you run into an edge, in which case it will shrink.) If you turn constrain off, you can move your fingers to change the crop and the aspect ratio, from rectangular to square.

Similarly, you can rest one finger (or, more conveniently, your thumb) in one corner of the trackpad and another finger in the opposite corner; if you move just one, keeping the other in place, the corresponding frame-handle will move. So, with thumb at bottom right and index finger at upper left, move your finger towards the center to pull the upper left corner of the frame inwards; move your thumb to pull up the lower right corner.