There are 3 distinct ways of making sure your pictures are around as long as you are. You can archive, save, and share pictures.

If you use iPhoto it’s easy to archive (or print) your pictures. Select the pictures you want to print, click the ‘order prints’ button and follow the instructions (this can also be accessed from the share menu). You will have prints mailed to you in a matter of days. This will ensure that your pictures are backed up the good ‘ol natural way. You can also print pictures yourself by selecting print from the file menu or hitting command + P.

Saving pictures onto an external hard drive or DVD is just as easy and provides a relatively easy way of getting access to your pictures. If you use iPhoto go to the share menu and click either ‘send to iDVD’ or ‘burn.’ If you use an external hard drive it’s just a matter of selecting all your pictures and moving them to your external hard drive or try iBackup. IBackup is a free utility to backup just the files and folders you desire with an easy-to-use interface. It also allows you to schedule backups whenever you like.

The last method is the one I prefer. Sharing pictures involves either getting a .mac account, which is by far the easiest way to share photos, podcasts, and movies on the web, or signing up for a free photo-sharing site such as flickr.com or photobucket.com. I suggest flickr.com of the two listed. You can find an addon for iPhoto here at JetPhotoSoft. All you have to do is select the pictures you want to upload in iphoto and start this addon. All your photos will be put on a secure server in a land far, far away.

How can I decide what pictures to import into iPhoto before they leave the camera? There must be a way, right?

No. There’s a reason why, though. If you’re looking at photos straight from your camera it’s going to be slow and you won’t get the full experience of iPhoto. There are a couple ways iPhoto manages importing pictures. Any pictures that are downloaded from your camera are just copied. You have to check off “remove items from camera after importing” for anything to happen to the pictures on your camera.

If you’re trying to import the same file twice iPhoto will ask you if you would like to. You can then check off yes or no and whether or not you want this decision to apply to all duplicates.

From there you can take the pictures you’ve imported, see them at their full resolution, edit them, and delete any unnecessary pictures you come across. Remember to empty your iPhoto trash!

If you don't want to use iPhoto to import your pictures it's easy enough to change which program you use or choose no program at all. Open Image Capture in your applications folder and click on preferences under the Image Capture menu. You should see a drop down menu asking you which program you would like to handle the pictures when you plug in a camera. You can even use Image Capture, itself, if you're not happy with the way other programs handle your pictures.

When you plug in your digital camera and open iPhoto you should be able to import your video clips along with your pictures. Once you have your video clips in the library you can move them around and use them in any program you want.

Next, if you want to create a DVD with a mix of pictures and video you can drag the video from iPhoto to the iMovie clip shelf and access your pictures from inside iMovie itself. Easy!

You can edit everything together, add music, and then export it to iDVD (or your iMovie format of choice). Once in iDVD you can apply the different title sequences to really make it look cool. For more details go to Apple’s support page where you can walk through all the features of iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD.