Section 9.3. The .Mac Slideshow


9.3. The .Mac Slideshow

Here is perhaps the weirdest and wildest way to share your photos online and on your networkpublish them as a . Mac slideshow .

When you send your photos out into the world as .Mac slides, other Mac OS X fans can subscribe to your show, displaying your pictures as their screen saver without manually downloading any files. (They do, of course, need an Internet connection.) In a minute or so, your latest photos can appear as full-screen slides on the Macintosh of a friend, family member, co-worker, or anyone else who knows your .Mac membership name .


Note: If your fans have iPhoto 6 or later, both you and they might much prefer the newer photocasting feature described in Section 9.4.1.

9.3.1. Creating a .Mac Slideshow

Before any other Mac users can connect to your slideshow pictures, you have to make them available via your .Mac account. (If you don't have a .Mac account, you'll be prompted to sign up for one when you attempt to use the .Mac feature. See the box in Section 9.2.2.) Here are the steps for publishing your slideshow:

  1. In iPhoto, select the photos you want to make available as screen saver slides .

    You can use one album, several albums, or even the whole Photo Library.

  2. Choose Share .Mac Slides .

    A dialog box opens, asking if you're sure you really want to publish your personal photos to the Internet. It's a question that deserves some consideration. Once you create .Mac slides, your pictures will be freely available to hundreds of thousands of Internet-connected Mac OS X fans around the world. All they need to know (or guess) is your .Mac membership name. If you have any reservations about making these glimpses of your life available to the world at large, now's the time to click Cancel.

    Otherwise, read on:

  3. Click Publish to begin uploading your photos .

    One by one, iPhoto grabs your photos and copies them to your iDisk, dropping them into a special location in the Pictures Slideshows Public folder.

    When all the photos are safely online, a confirmation dialog box appears, letting you know that your slideshow is now available. (If you look at the uploaded files on your iDisk, you'll notice that iPhoto has renamed your pictures according to its own private naming scheme. It's only the uploaded copies that have been renamed , however, not the photos on your Mac.)

    Figure 9-13. Once you've made your photos available to the whole world for use as a screen saver, iPhoto can help you tell everyone about it, too. Click the Announce Slideshow button in the confirmation dialog box to launch your email program and generate an announcement email. As you can see here, the announcement contains complete instructions for accessing the slideshow using the Screen Effects or Screen Saver panel of System Preferences.

    Note: You can publish any number of Web sites on your .Mac account, but only one set of .Mac slides. Each time you upload photos for a .Mac slideshow, you replace any earlier slideshow photos you've uploaded.
  4. Click Announce Slideshow, if you like (see Figure 9-13) .

    If you'd rather not email your friends to let them know about your slides, click Quit instead. Then use your Mac's screen saver feature, as outlined in the next section, to see the fruits of your labor.

9.3.2. Subscribing to a .Mac Slideshow

After you've uploaded your photos as .Mac slides, you, or anyone else with Mac OS X 10.2 or later and an Internet connection, can subscribe to the show and make it into a screen saver. Here's how:

  1. Choose System Preferences. Open the proper preferences pane by clicking the Screen Effects (Mac OS X 10.2) or Desktop & Screen Saver icon (Mac OS X 10.3 or later) .

    Switch to the Screen Effects (Mac OS X 10.2) or Screen Saver (Mac OS X 10.3 or later) tab of the window, if it's not already displayed. This is where you choose the particular effect that your Mac will use as a screen saver.

    Figure 9-14. You can connect to screen savers created by other Mac users around the world by using the .Mac Screen Effects option. Don't forget to visit the other two tabs in the Screen Effects panelActivation and Hot Corners. On the Activation tab, you can tell your Mac how long it must sit idle before your custom screen saver kicks in. The options in the Hot Corners tab let you flip screen effects on or off by moving your mouse into a designated corner of the screen.
  2. Click .Mac in the Screen Effects list .

    On the little Preview screen, shown in Figure 9-14, you can click the Configure (Mac OS X 10.2) or Options (Mac OS X 10.3 and later) button to select a slideshow and set up the playback options.

  3. Click the Configure (or Options) button .

    The Subscriptions window appears. The controls here determine which slideshows you can see on your Mac and how they're displayed.

  4. In the .Mac Membership Name box, enter the name of the .Mac member whose slideshow you want to see .

    There's no way to get this name. Unless you find the creator's name at the http://dotmac. info Web page (see the box on the next page), you just have to know it.


    Tip: You can subscribe to as many different .Mac slideshows as you want. As you do, their names accumulate in the Subscriptions window.
  5. Choose your Display Options .

    Adjust the checkboxes in the lower portion of the window to change the way the slides are to be presented on your screen. You can control zooming, crossfades, and other options, as shown in Figure 9-15.

    Figure 9-15. Your Mac remembers each show you've subscribed to. You can have it use or ignore any combination of shows by turning the Selected checkbox next to each title on or off. You can also change the order in which the shows are presented by dragging them into a different order in this list.
  6. Click OK to return to the main Screen Effects window .

    This is the big moment: The Mac hooks up to the .Mac site(s) you've specified and finds the shared slideshow. Seconds later, you see the results of your tinkering . The slides you've subscribed to appear on the little Preview screen in a miniature version of the slideshow, complete with zooming effects and crossfades.


    Note: If the slideshow you've subscribed to is very large, the Preview screen may remain black for a minute or two as the images get downloaded to your Mac.
  7. Click the Test button to preview the slideshow at full size .

    Your screen goes black, and then the first of the slides to which you've subscribed fills the screen. Depending on the options you've selected, the slideshow progresses with photos slowly zooming and crossfading into each other. To end the test, just click your mouse.

You've now got a remote slideshow that will play back on your screen according to the rules you've set up in the Activation and Hot Corners tabs of the Screen Effects panel. Of course, at any time, you can go back into Screen Effects and reconfigure the .Mac slide settings: add additional slideshows to your subscriptions, rearrange their playback order, or (when the kid in your cousin's new-baby slideshow turns 21, perhaps) delete .Mac slideshows from the list.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
Trolling for .Mac Slides

The idea of sharing .Mac slides with friends sounds great, and I would do it in a heartbeatif I had more friends. As it turns out, I don't know another soul running Mac OS X. Am I destined to watch my same boring photos crossfade into each other, day after day, in utter solitude ?

Fortunately, no. Thousands of .Mac members have already made their slideshows available to the world, and they're just waiting for you to subscribe to them.

The trick is to visit http://dotmac.info, where you'll find a listing of movies, photo albums, calendars, Web sites, and .Mac slideshows, all contributed by other .Mac members. You can search for specific items or just browse the listings, then subscribe to any number of slideshows. Thanks to the miracle of modern technology, you can now fill your screen with the photos of total strangers.

Want to give the world access to your slideshow, too? Click the Add a Page button on the dotmac.info home page. Add a description of your slides along with your membership name, so that anyone who wants to can subscribe to your slides from their Mac.





iPhoto 6
iPhoto 6: The Missing Manual
ISBN: 059652725X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 183

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