10.4. Phase 4: Design the Pages

10.3. Phase 3: Initial Layout

iPhoto is nearly ready to lead you into Book Layout Land, where you'll see, for the first time, your pictures inserted into Apple's page designs.

First, though, you're asked the important question shown in Figure 10-2: Do you want to place the photos on the pages yourself (Manually), or would you like iPhoto to do the job for you (Automatically)?

• Automatically. Click this button if you're in a hurry or you're not especially confident in your own design skills. iPhoto springs into action, arranging photos, in the sequence you've specified, on successive pages of the book.

  No doubt, it's a fast and easy way to lay out the pages of your book, but of course you may not agree with iPhoto's choices. It may clump that prizewinning shot of the dog nosing the basketball through the hoop on the same page as three less impressive pictures.

  On the other hand, you can always touch up the layout afterward, accepting most of iPhoto's design but punching it up where necessary, as described on the following pages.

• Manually. If you click Manually, iPhoto creates an entire book for you, complete with attractively arranged pages ”but instead of your own pictures, you see only gray rectangles. At the top of the screen, you see thumbnails of the pictures you selected; you're now supposed to drag them onto the gray rectangles, thus assembling your book by hand.

  Along the way, you're always free to change the number of photos on the page, to rearrange photos or pages, or to add or delete pages or photos. The following pages describe this process.

Figure 10-2. Automatic layout or manual? Well, how much time you got?

10.4. Phase 4: Design the Pages

When you click Automatically or Manually, two more things happen. First, a new icon appears in your Source list, representing the book layout you're about to create. You can work with it as you would other kinds of Source-list icons. For example, you can delete it by dragging it to the iPhoto Trash, rename it by double-clicking, file it in a folder by dragging it there, and so on.

Second, you now see something like Figure 10-3. The page you're working on always appears at nearly full size in the main part of the window. Up above, you see a set of thumbnails, either of your photos or of your book pages (more on this in a moment); that's the photo browser. iPhoto has just turned into a page-layout program.

Once you've selected an album and a theme, the most time-consuming phase begins: designing the individual pages.

10.4.1. Open a Page

That photo browser at the top of the window has two functions, as represented by the two tiny icons at its left edge.

When you click the top one (the blue page button), you see miniatures of the pages in your book. This is your navigation tool, your master scroll bar. When you click one of the page thumbnails, the full-sized (well, fuller - sized ) image of that page appears in the main editing area.

Figure 10-3. Book mode is a miniature page layout program right in iPhoto. Use the picture-size slider to zoom in or out from the page you're working on, which can be handy when you're editing captions at small type sizes. Also note the single-page /two-page switch at the lower-left corner. For books with two-sided printing, it lets you specify whether you want to edit single pages or two-page spreads .

The lower icon presents a desktop, a pasteboard , a temporary scrapbook, for unplaced photos pictures that you've said you want in your book, but haven't yet inserted. (You can see this view of the photo browser in Figure 10-8.) The unplaced-photos area is also convenient for dragging the photos into a satisfying sequence before you transfer them onto the book's pages.

In any case, the first step in building your book is to click a page to work on. Most people start with the Cover pagethe first thumbnail in the row. When it's selected, the cover photo appears in the main picture area. This is the picture that will appear, centered, on the linen or glossy cover of the actual book. You can't do much with the cover except to change the title or subtitle ; see "Edit the Text" on page 272. You'll choose the cover color in a later step.

10.4.2. Choose a Page Type

After you're finished working with the cover, open the next page you want to work on. If you did some preliminary photo-arranging work (in an album, for example), your photos should already be in roughly the right order for the book pagesbut not necessarily the right groupings.

Whether you opted to have your photos placed into the book manually or automatically, you can see that iPhoto cheerfully suggests varying the number of photos per page. Two-per-page on the first page, a big bold one on the next, a set of four on the next, and so on. (In the case of a manual layout, these placements are represented on the screen by empty gray rectangles.)

If you approve of the photos-per-page proposal, great. You can go to work choosing which photos to put on each page, as described in the following pages.

Sooner or later, though, there will come a time when you want three related photos to appear on a page that currently holds only two. That's the purpose of the Page Type pop-up menu shown in Figure 10-4. It's a list of the different page designs that Apple has drawn up to fit the overall design theme you've selected.

Figure 10-4. The Page Type pop-up menu (top left, lower left) lets you specify how many photos you want on this page, and lists bonus page types like Cover and Introduction. Right: Once you've chosen a Page Type, you can use the Page Design pop-up menu. It shows tiny previews of the different layouts available for the Page Type you've selected.

You control how many pictures appear on a page by choosing from the Page Type pop-up menu. Your choices are:

• Cover. The first thumbnail in your book must have the Cover design.

  (You can choose Cover from the pop-up menu for subsequent pages, too, but that's just a bug; it doesn't actually affect the design of the chosen page.)

• Introduction. In most themes, this special page design has no photos at all. It's just a big set of text boxes that you can type (or paste) into. Here's where you can let the audience know about the trip, the company, or the family; tell the story behind the book; praise the book's lucky recipient; scare off intellectual-property thieves with impressive-sounding copyright notices; and so on.

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  Tip: An Introduction page (one of the choices in the Page Type pop-up menu) doesn't have to be the first page of the book (after the cover). Truth is, you can turn any page into an Introduction page. Such pages make terrific section dividers .They're especially useful in designs that use the Picture Book theme, where no text accompanies the photos. In this case, an Introduction page can set the scene and explain the following (uncaptioned) pages of pictures.

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• One, Two, Three, Four These commands let you specify how many photos appear on the selected page. iPhoto automatically arranges them according to its own internal sense of symmetry. (Most themes offer up to six or seven photos per page.)

  Use these options to create a pleasing overall layout for the book and give it variety. Follow a page with one big photo with a page of four smaller ones, for example.

  You can also use these commands to fit the number of photos you have to the length of your book. If you have lots of pictures and don't want to go over the $30 10-page limit, then choose higher picture counts for most pages. Conversely, if iPhoto warns you that you have blank pages at the end of your book, spread your photos out by choosing just one or two photos for some pages.

• One with Text, Title Page, Text Page, About Page, Contact Page. Some themes, especially the Folio theme, offer their own private page designs. In general, they're designed to hold specialized blobs of text that are unique to that book design.

• Blank. Here's another way to separate sections of your book: Use an empty page. Well, empty of pictures, anyway; most of the new iPhoto 5 themes still offer a choice of "look" for a blank page, such as a choice of color or simulated page texture.

• End. The Story Book theme offers a bonus page design called End. Use it for the last page of the book.

The End page is designed to hold three pictures, and you'd be well advised to fiddle with your album until the last page does, in fact, have three photos on it. Otherwise, you'll wind up with a strange , half-filled look on the End page. For example, if there's only one photo on it, that picture will sit halfway off the left margin, as though sailing off to the left ("Later, dude!"), and the rest of the page will be blank.

10.4.3. Pick a Layout Variation

Once you've chosen how many photos you want on a page, the Page Design pop-up menu becomes available to you. As shown at right in Figure 10-4, it contains tiny thumbnail representations of the various photo layouts available. If you chose Three as the number of photos, for example, the Page Design pop-up menu may offer you a choice of page background (for a three-photo layout) or a couple of different arrangements of those three photosbig one on top, two down the side, or whatever.

In some themes, especially the older ones, you're not offered any choices at all. There's only one arrangement for a two-photo layout, one for a three-photo layout, and so on. In some of the new iPhoto 5 themes, a page type may offer over a dozen variations. Try before you buy.

10.4.4. Lay Out the Book

The key to understanding iPhoto 5's book-layout mode is realizing that all photos are draggable. Dragging is the key to all kinds of book-design issues (see Figure 10-5).

In fact, between dragging photos and using a handful of menu commands, you can perform every conceivable kind of photo- and page-manipulation trick there is.

10.4.4.1 Ways to manipulate photos

Here are all the different ways to move photos around in your book (see Figure 10-5 for a summary):

• Swap two photos on the same page (or two-page spread) by dragging one directly on top of the other. When the existing picture sprouts a colored border, let go of the mouse button; the two pictures swap places.

  FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION The Save Command

  Yo where's the Save command? There isn't one. iPhoto automatically saves your work as you go. If you want to make a safety copy along the waythat is, a fallback versionControl-click the book's icon in the Source list and then, from the shortcut menu, choose Duplicate. This process takes virtually no extra memory or disk space, but it's good insurance. If you change the layout or theme of a book, iPhoto vaporizes all the text you've entered (and often a lot of the layout work). If that ever happens, you'll be glad you had a backup.

  
  

• Move a photo to a different page of the book by dragging it onto a different page in the photo browser.

• Remove a photo from a page by clicking its icon and then pressing your Delete key. Its icon moves up into the unplaced-photos area (Figure 10-5). (You can also drag the photo directly into the unplaced-photo browser, if it's visible.) There it will remain until you move it back onto a book page or delete it.

  Figure 10-5. iPhoto's book-layout mode is absolutely crawling with tricks that let you move photos around, add them to pages, remove them, and so on. The fun begins when you finally understand the difference between the page browser (top) and the unplaced-photo browser (bottom). For example, you can add new photos to your book only via the unplaced-photo browser. Use the page browser more as a navigational tool.

  
  

• Remove a photo from the book altogether by (a) moving it to the unplaced-photo area as described above (or just dragging it off the page), then (b) clicking it again (in its current photo-browser location) and, finally, (c) pressing Delete again.

  Note that removing a photo also changes the resulting page type from a four-photo page layout (for example) to a three-page layout. In other words, the three remaining pictures snap into a different arrangement to fill up the new space. (And if you delete the last photo on a page, you wind up with a big gray placeholder.)

• Shove one overlapping photo "under" another by Control-clicking it and, from the shortcut menu, choosing Send to Back. Figure 10-6 reveals all.

  Figure 10-6. In some book themes, photos have been "tossed" onto the page so that they overlap slightly. In the rare event that an important part of a photo is covered up by another, you can rearrange their front-to-back order using the shortcut menu shown at left. Here, the lower photo (left) is being slipped underneath the upper photo (right).

  
  

• Add an unplaced photo to a page by dragging it out of the unplaced-photos browser (Figure 10-3) onto a blank spot of the page. iPhoto automatically increases the number of photos on that page, even changing the Page Type pop-up menu to match.

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  Note: This won't work if the page already has the maximum number of photos on it, according to the theme you've chosen. For example, the Folio theme permits a maximum of two pictures per page.

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• Swap in an unplaced photo by dragging it out of the unplaced-photos browser onto a photo that's already on a page of your book. iPhoto swaps the two, putting the outgoing photo back into the unplaced-photo browser.

• Add new photos to the unplaced-photo area by dragging them onto the book's Source-list icon. For example, you can click any album, smart album, slideshow, or Library icon to see what photos are insideand then drag the good ones onto your book icon.

  Once these photos have arrived in the unplaced-photo area, you can drag them onto individual pages as described above.

• Fill in an empty gray placeholder frame by dragging a photo onto it from the unplaced-photos area.

  Figure 10-7. Top: Double-click a photo to make its zoom slider appear. Drag the slider to the right to enlarge the photo. Bottom: At this point, you can drag inside the photo to adjust its position within its "frame." None of this affects the actual photo (as using the iPhoto cropping tool would). You're basically just changing the relationship between the photo and its boundary rectangle on the page template. Of course, you'll have to be careful not to enlarge the photo so much that it triggers the dreaded yellow-triangle low-resolution warning.

  
  

• Fill in all the gray placeholders with photos by clicking the Autoflow button at the bottom of the window. (Those gray placeholders appear when you choose the Manual layout option described on page 258, or whenever your book has more pages than photos you've put on them.)

  Either way, clicking Autoflow "pours" all of the unplaced photos into the gray placeholders of your book, front to back. When they arrive , they'll be in the same order as they appeared in the thumbnails browser.

  If the results aren't quite what you expected, you can always use the Edit Undo command to backtrack.

• Enlarge or crop a picture, right there on the page, by double-clicking it. A tiny zoom slider appears above the photo, which you can use to magnify the picture or shift it inside its boundary "frame" (see Figure 10-7). For now, it's worth remembering that this trick is helpful when you want to call attention to one part of the photo, or to "crop" a photo for book-layout purposes without actually editing the original.

• Edit a photo by Control-clicking it and, from the shortcut menu, choosing Edit Photo. In a flash, book-layout mode disappears, and you find yourself in the editing mode described in Chapter 6. (Either the picture appears in its own window, or the Edit tools fill the bottom toolbar, depending on your iPhoto preference settings.)

  When you're finished editing, click the Done button (or, if you're editing in a separate window, close it). You return to the layout mode, with the changes intact.

10.4.4.2 Ways to manipulate pages

Photos aren't the only ones having all the fun. You can drag and manipulate the pages themselves , too:

• Move pages around within the book by dragging their thumbnails horizontally in the photo browser.

• Remove a page from the book by clicking its photo-browser icon and then either pressing Delete or choosing Edit Remove Page. (If you use the Delete-key method, iPhoto asks if youre sure you know what you're doing.)

  Note that removing a page never removes any pictures from the book. They just fall into the unplaced-photos area, ready to use later if you like. But removing a page does vaporize any captions you've carefully typed in.

• Insert a new page into the book by clicking the Add Page button at the bottom of the window, or by choosing Edit Add Page.

  Before you go nuts with it, though, note that iPhoto inserts the new page after the page you're currently viewing. It's helpful, therefore, to begin by first clicking the desired page thumbnail (in the page browser at the top of the window).

  If you have some leftover pictures in the unplaced photos area, iPhoto uses them to fill the new page; if not, you just get empty gray placeholders. (iPhoto takes it upon itself to decide how many photos appear on the new page.) In any case, now you know how to change the number of photos on that page, or at least how to replace the pictures that iPhoto put there.

10.4.4.3 Layout strategies

Sometimes chronological order is the natural sequence for your photos, especially for memento books of trips, parties, weddings, and so on. Of course, there's nothing to stop you from cheating a bitrearranging certain scenesfor greater impact and variety.

As you drag your pictures into order, consider these effects:

• Intersperse group shots with solo portraits, scenery with people shots, vertical photos with horizontal ones.

• On multiple-photo pages, exploit the direction your subjects face (Figure 10-8). On a three-picture page, for example, you could arrange the people in the photos so that they're all looking roughly toward the center of the page, for a feeling of inclusion. You might put a father looking upward to a shot of his son diving on a photo higher on the page, or a brother and sister back-to-back facing outward, signifying competition.

• Group similar shots together on a page.

Figure 10-8. Variety is goodbut thematic unity is effective. Here, two photos taken at the same event, moments apart, feel comfortable together. They tell a little story and add action to your book. (This illustration also shows the unplaced-photos area at the top of the window. Its thumbnails represent all the currently homeless pictures, the ones that you haven't yet placed on a pageor that were on a page, but you removed them. It's a handy temporary storage shelf.)

10.4.5. Making Your Photos Shape Up

iPhoto's design templates operate on the simple premise that all of your photos have a 4:3 aspect ratio. That is, the long and short sides of the photo are in four-to-three proportion- (four inches to three inches, for example).

Figure 10-9. Top: When you first start working on a book, the photos all look nice together. They nestle nicely side by side. Every now and then, however, you may be disheartened to find that iPhoto is lopping off a dear one's head. Bottom: If you Control-click a photo and choose Fit Photo to Frame, you'll discover that the problem is a photo that doesn't have 4:3 proportions (on this page, that's three of them). iPhoto thought it was doing you a favor by blowing it up enough to fill the 4:3 box. Now you get ugly white gaps, but, hey, at least you're seeing the entire photo.