Chapter 2. creating a photo book

You can't create a folder with the same name as any other item, even if it's enclosed within another folder.

You can hide the contents of a folder by clicking the triangle to its left. Reveal a folder's contents by clicking the triangle again.

There is a Settings button to the far right of the toolbar at the bottom of the window which gives you access to the default fonts that iPhoto uses for each book theme. I (and others) have found it to be extremely buggy as of version 5.0.2, routinely applying a different font than the one chosen . I recommend avoiding the Settings box altogether.

If you type too much text and/or make it too big for its box, iPhoto will display a yellow warning triangle near the text. Either reduce the size or the quantity of text until the triangle disappears.

You can also use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move from one page to another.

If you don't want iPhoto to auto-matically crop your photo, you can Control-click the photo and choose Fit Photo to Frame Size . For more details, see page 139.

If you choose a page type with fewer photos than the current one, any extra photos will be returned to the photo browser.

If you don't like the results, choose Edit > Undo before you click the Done button, or Control-click the photo in Edit mode at any time and choose Revert to Original to remove all edits.

Once you can see the zoom slider, you can then double-click the photo again to get into Edit mode.

You can't move a picture around in its box unless it is bigger than the box, either because iPhoto fit it into a box of a different orientation (as on page 45), or because you've just enlarged it.

Enlarging a picture this way, in contrast with cropping a photo as described on pages 8081, does not affect the way the photo appears in any other book or slideshow.

Not all page types have distinct page designs from which to choose. In Appendix A, you'll find each book theme's page types along with the page designs that correspond to each one.

The three-photo design that iPhoto offers by default on page 4 of the Travel theme is tricky. If you drag a photo to one of the lateral frames first, the layout will change to the regular three-photo page design (without the large creased central photo). If that happens, the only way to get back to the special page design is to choose Edit > Undo .

Of course, you may not like that creased effect, in which case you can drag the photos any way you like and smile when it disappears.

Sometimes iPhoto changes the design when you rearrange photos, especially when you are mixing horizontal and vertical photos. See Appendix A for examples.

In this example, the result would be the same if you dragged the photo on page 4 on top of the photo in page 5.

If you zoom in too far, you'll see a small yellow warning triangle in the upper-right corner. This means that the photo may appear pixelated when you print it, or in layman's terms, that you've blown it up too big. Drag back to the left a little until the yellow triangle disappears.

The zoom control appears when you double-click the photo. If you double-click again, you'll jump to Edit mode (where you can click Done to return to Book view). The pan hand does not appear until you drag (after double-clicking).

If the Move to Front command does not appear when you Control-click, it may be that you're Control-clicking the page and not the photo.

In the Travel theme you can use Send to Back to make the photos go behind the little passport stamps that are part of the design of the book.

You can remove a photo from a book entirely by selecting it in the photo browser (not on a layout) and pressing the Delete key.

If there are photos in the photo browser when you use Autoflow, these photos are placed on new pages and do not fill empty frames on earlier pages.

If there are no photos in the photo browser when you use Autoflow, iPhoto reflows the entire book in order to fill every frame on every page while maintaining the current order of the photos. If you don't like the results, you can always choose Edit > Undo .

The Autoflow command often places photos in a different order than you'd expect. For example, in the Travel theme two-photo page, it puts the first photo on the right and the second on the left. But in the three-photo page, it places the photos from left to right. On the seven-photo page, as you can see in the example, it places the first photo in the lower-right corner, the second in the upper-left corner, the third in the upper-right corner, the fourth in the lower-left corner, the fifth in the center, the sixth in the upper-center and the seventh in the lower-center!

If you don't see the Autoflow button, it may be hidden because your window is too narrow. In such a case, you can choose Autoflow from the >> menu that replaced it. Also see page 51 for more details.

The Clean Up Book command, which appears when you Control-click an iPhoto book page, was almost identical to the Autoflow button in version 5.0.1. However, instead of leaving empty frames on earlier pages empty, it removed them entirely, changing page designs as necessary. In version 5.0.2 (and presumably later versions), the Clean Up Book command only removes empty frames from half-filled pages, but does not fill or otherwise affect any empty pages.

I should note that I counted and ordered the photos that would be flowed onto pages 1417 ahead of time so that they would look nice when they were autoflowed. Indeed, that's a good way to use the Autoflow button: study the default layout that iPhoto creates (detailed in Appendix A), choose the right number of photos for each page and then let iPhoto place them all.

iPhoto does not choose a selection of page types and designs to suit your photo-graphs. Instead, it has a default layout pattern for each book theme which it always applies. (You can find all of the book theme's default layouts illustrated in Appendix A.) For some curious reason, iPhoto doesn't use some of its nicest page designs in these layouts. For example, the two-photo design used on page 20 of the project in this book and a four-photo postcard page, among others, are not part of the default layout for the Travel theme. Be sure to look through Appendix A and explore all the page types and designs.

If you're not viewing the pages of the book as facing pages (see page 49), you can reorder individual pages. For example, if you want to switch the order of two pages in a spread, you'd have to first click the single page view, and then drag the right page towards the left in the photo browser.

If the page that you remove contained photos, these are returned unharmed to the photo browser.

You can also add pages . Either click the Add Page button at the bottom of the Book window or Control-click a page and choose Add Page from the pop-up menu that appears. If you're viewing two-page spreads (see page 49), you'll get two new pages. If you're viewing individual pages, you'll just get one new page.

It would be nice if the Clean Up Book command that appears when you Control-click a page actually got rid of your empty pages, but alas, it does not. Instead it only removes the empty photo frames from half-filled pages . It does not affect completely empty pages in the slightest.

If you like, you can add photos to the empty pages instead of remov-ing them. While iPhoto books must have at least 20 pages, they can have up to one hundred.