13.4. Plug-Ins and Add-Ons

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13.3. Exporting and Converting Pictures

The whole point of iPhoto is to provide a centralized location for every photo in your world. That doesn't mean that they're locked there, however; it's as easy to take pictures out of iPhoto as it is to put them in. Spinning out a photo from iPhoto can be useful in situations like these:

  • You're creating a Web page outside of iPhoto and you need a photo in a certain size and format.

  • You shot a bunch of 6-megapixel photos, you're running out of disk space, and you wish they were all 4-megapixel shots instead. They'd still have plenty of resolution, but not so much wasted space.

  • You're going to submit some photos to a newspaper or magazine, and the publication requires TIFF-format photos, not iPhoto's standard JPEG format.

  • Somebody else on your network loves one of your pictures and would like to use it as a desktop background on that machine.

  • You want to set free a few of the photos so that you can copy them back onto the camera's memory card. (Some people use their digicams as much for showing pictures to their friends as for taking them.)

  • You want to send a batch of pictures on a CD to someone.

13.3.1. Exporting by Dragging

It's amazingly easy to export photos from iPhoto: Just drag their thumbnails out of the photo viewing area and onto the desktop (or onto a folder, or into a window on the desktop), as shown in Figure 13-3. After a moment, you'll see their icons appear.

The drag-and-drop method has enormous virtue in its simplicity and speed. It does not, however, grant you much flexibility. It produces JPEG files only, at the original camera resolution, with the camera's own cryptic naming scheme.

Figure 13-3. This technique produces full-size JPEG graphics, exactly as they appear in iPhoto. Their names , however, are not particularly user friendly. Instead of "Persimmon Close Up," as you named it in iPhoto, a picture might wind up on the desktop named 200205040035140. JPG or IMG_5197.JPG.


13.3.2. Exporting by Dialog Box

To gain control over the dimensions, names, and file formats of the exported graphics, use the Export command. After selecting one picture, a group of pictures, or an album, you can invoke this command by choosing Share Export (Shift- -E).

The Export Photos dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 13-4. Click the File Export tab, if necessary, and then make the following decisions:

Figure 13-4. The Export dialog box gives you control over the file format, names, and dimensions of the pictures you're about to send off from iPhoto. The number of photos you're about to export appears in the lower-left corner of the box. You can even tell iPhoto to use whatever names you gave your pictures, instead of the original, incomprehensible file names bestowed by your camera. To do so, click "Use title."


13.3.2.1 File format

You can use the Format pop-up menu to specify the file format of the graphics that you're about to export. Here are your options:

  • Original. iPhoto exports the images in whatever format they were in when you imported them. If the picture came from a digital camera, for example, it's usually a JPEG.

    If your camera captured a RAW-format photo (page 91), though, the Original option is even more valuable . It lets you export the original RAW file so that you can, for example, work with your RAWs in a more sophisticated editor like Adobe's Camera Raw (which comes with Photoshop).

  • JPG. This abbreviation is shorthand for JPEG, which stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group (that's the group of geeks who came up with this format). The JPEG format is, of course, the most popular format for photos on the Internet (and in iPhoto), thanks to its high image quality and small file size.

  • TIFF. These files (whose abbreviation is short for Tagged Image File Format) are something like JPEG without the "lossy" compression. That is, they maintain every bit of quality available in the original photograph, but usually take up much more disk space (or memory-card space) as a result. TIFF is a good choice if quality is more important than portability.

  • PNG. This relatively new format (Portable Network Graphics) was designed to replace the GIF format on the Web. (The company that came up with the algorithms behind the GIF format exercised its legal musclelong story.)

Whereas GIF graphics generally don't make good photos because they're limited to 256 colors, PNG is a good choice for photos (except the variation called PNG-8, which is just as limited as GIF). The resulting files are smaller than TIFF images, yet don't exhibit any compression- related quality loss,   la JPEGs. Not all graphics programs and Web browsers recognize this relatively new format, but the big onesincluding iPhoto, GraphicConverter, Photoshop, and most recent browser versionsall do.

13.3.2.2 Named option

iPhoto maintains two names for each photo: its original file name , as it appears in the Finder, and its iPhoto title, the one you may have typed in while working in the program. Click either "Use filenames" or "Use titles" to specify what names iPhoto gives the icons of the graphics you're about to export. (When you export just one photo, you're offered the chance to name it whatever you like.)

Your third option is "Use album name." It tells iPhoto to name your exported photos according to their album nameand sequence within that album. If an exported photo is the fourth picture in the first row of an album titled Dry Creek, iPhoto will call the exported file "Dry Creek 04.jpg." Because you determine the order within an album (by dragging), this is the only option that lets you control the numbering of the exported result.

13.3.2.3 Size options

Remember that although digital camera graphics files may not always have enough resolution for prints, they generally have far too much resolution for displaying on the screen.

As Chapter 9 makes clear, iPhoto offers to scale them down automatically whenever you email them or transfer them to the Web. If you turn on "Scale images no larger than," and then fill in some pixel dimensions in the boxes, you can oversee the same kind of shrinkage for your exported graphics. Points of reference: 1024 x 768 is exactly the right size to completely fill a standard 15-inch monitor, and 640 x 480 is a good size for emailing (it fills up about a quarter of the screen).


Tip: You can also use this option to de-megapixelize a bunch of photos. Suppose they're all 8-megapixel photosmore than you'll ever need. Export them at, say, 2272 x 1704 pixels (about four megapixels) to a folder on your desktop called "4 Megas" (or something). Delete the originals from your Photo Library, if you like, and then re-import the scaled-down versions by dragging that 4 Megas folder off the desktop and into the album list.
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iPhoto 5. The Missing Manual
iPhoto 5. The Missing Manual
ISBN: 596100345
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 179

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