iPhoto is a rich, flexible, "digital shoebox" for your digital photos. It's a glorious program that could easily be the topic of its own book. In fact, it is a book iPhoto 5 (or whatever the current version number is): The Missing Manual .
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But the basics are easy enough. When you connect a recent-model USB camera and click Import (Figure 14-20), this program automatically sucks the pictures into your Mac. (Using the appropriate checkbox, you can also opt to have them erased from the camera after being transferred.)
You now see a neatly arranged grid of thumbnails (Figure 14-21). You're looking at what iPhoto refers to as your Photo Library your entire photo collection, including every last picture you've ever imported. Use the Size slider at lower right to adjust the thumbnail size .
An album is a subset of pictures from your Photo Library, grouped together for easy access and viewing. It's represented by a little album-book icon in the album list. (If you've used playlists in iTunes, or mailboxes in Mail, you'll recognize the concept.) Albums make finding photos much faster. Furthermore, only in an album can you drag your photos into a different order .
To create an iPhoto album, choose File New Album (-N), or click the + button in the iPhoto window, below the album list. Type a descriptive name ( Yellowstone 2005, Edna in Paris , or whatever), click OK, and watch as a new album icon appears in the Album pane. (See Figure 14-21.)
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To rename an album, double-click its name or icon. A renaming rectangle appears, with text highlighted and ready to be edited.
To add photos to an album, drag them onto its icon. (Putting photos in an album doesn't move or copy them. You're just creating references to, or aliases of, the photos in your master Photo Library. In other words, each photo can appear in as many different albums as you want.)
Once they're in iPhoto, there's no end to the fun you can have with your pictures.
Enhance . With one click, this tool endeavors to make photos look more vibrant by tweaking the brightness and contrast settings and adjusting the saturation to compensate for washed-out or oversaturated colors.
Cropping . The cropping tool lets you cut away the outer portions of a photo to improve its composition or to make it the right size for a printout or Web page. (Choose a fixed proportion from the Constrain menu, if you like, then drag across the photo to indicate how you want it cropped. Finally, click Crop.)
Retouch . This little brush lets you paint out minor imperfections like blemishes, freckles, and scratches.
Red-Eye . This little filter gets rid of a very common photo glitchthose shining red dots that sometimes appear in a person's eyes as the result of flash photography. Who wants to look like a werewolf?
B & W . Turns your color photos into moody black-and-white art shots.
Sepia . Makes new photos look faded and brownish, for that old-time photography look.
Adjust . Opens the new Adjust panel, whose sliders offer ridiculous amounts of control over color balance, exposure, and other parameters.
iPhoto provides a number of different features for bringing your photos to a wider audience. Most are available in both the Share menu and the "toolbar" at the bottom of the window.
Print . iPhoto offers more print options than just about any other program. For example, you can cluster several photos on the same piece of paper, to save ink.
Slideshow . You can create three different kinds of slideshows in iPhoto: instant (no options, just pictures), quick (some options in a dialog box), and saved (tons of control in a full-window editor).
To make an instant show, just Option-click the Play button in the lower-left corner of the window. When you've had enough, click the mouse.
For more control, click the Play button without pressing Option. You get to fine tune the slideshow, from the soundtrack to the transition.
Finally, if you'd like to organize the specific images that appear in your slideshow and save them for display laterclick the Slideshow icon at the bottom of the window. It tosses you into the Slideshow editing mode, which has some features of Edit mode and some of regular old thumbnail-organizing mode.
Email . Start by selecting one picture, or a few. Then click the Email button. (Its icon reflects your choice of email program, as you've specified in the iPhoto Preferences command.)
iPhoto asks you what size you want the photo to bean extremely friendly gesture, because sending a full-size digital camera picture is grossly overblown for viewing onscreen, and will probably choke your recipient's email account. That's why iPhoto offers to scale the picture down to reasonable size, such as 640 by 480 dots.
Click Compose. After a moment, an empty piece of email appears, with the file already attached, ready for you to type in the address and any comments you want to include.
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Order prints . This option uploads your selected photos andfor a feeconverts them into handsome Kodak prints that get mailed back to you.
Book . iPhoto's Book feature lets you design and order (via the Internet) a gorgeous, linen-covered, 8-by-11inch book, printed at a real bindery and shipped back to you in a slipcover. Your photos are printed on the glossy, acid-free pages, complete with captions, if you like.
Book prices start at $10not counting mini-books, which start at $4 in bulk. That's about the least you could hope to pay for a handsome, emotionally powerful gift guaranteed never to wind up in an attic, garage sale, or eBay.
Once you've selected an album or a batch of photos, click the Book button below the main picture area, or choose File New Book. Now you see something like Figure 14-22: a dialog box in which you can specify what you want your book to look like. You can choose hardcover or softcover, single- or double-sided pages, and which design scheme you want.
When you click Choose Theme, a message appears to let you know you have two choices for placing photos onto the book-page layouts: either click the Autoflow button (to make the Mac do the job for you), or drag photos individually into the placeholders. Click OK.
Now a new icon appears in the Source list (at the left side of the window) to represent your book. You also see something like Figure 14-23, where the page you're working on appears at full size, for your editing pleasure
At this point, you can choose a page type (from the Page Type pop-up menu), pick a variation for the current layout (from the Page Design pop-up menu), and, most importantly, drag images from the list at the top of the window into the picture spaces on each of your pages.
When you think your book is ready for birth, click Buy Bookand wait several minutes as iPhoto converts your design into an Internet-transmittable file.
HomePage . If you have a .Mac account (Section 5.4.2), you can turn an album or a selection of photos into an instant Web-page gallery, complete with fast-down-loading thumbnail images that your visitors can click to magnify. All you have to do is send your fans the Web address provided by the .Mac account.
Figure 14-23. There's a miniature page-layout program right in iPhoto. Note that the picture-size slider is still present. You can use it to zoom in or out from the page, which can be handy when you're editing text (including 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 one page at a time, or one two-page spread at a time. |
To create a .Mac slideshow, select the album or photos you want to share, and then click this button (or, if you don't see it, choose Share .Mac Slides). Click Publish to begin uploading your photos. When the process is complete, click Announce Slideshow to email your friends to let them know about your slides.
Desktop . Click one photo and then click this button. iPhoto instantly fills your desktop background with that photo.
If you click one album and then click this button, you turn that album's contents into a spectacular screen saver feature that fills your screen with animated, gently flowing photographs when your iMac isn't in use.
Burn Disc . iPhoto CDs are discs (either CDs or DVDs) that you can create directly from within iPhoto to archive your entire Photo Libraryor any selected portion of itwith just a few mouse clicks. This is a great way to back up your photos; transfer them to another Mac without losing all your keywords, descriptions, and titles; share discs with other iPhoto fans; offload photos to CD or DVD as your photo collection grows; or merge separate Photo Libraries (such as the one on your iBook and the one on your iMac) into a single master library.
These discs do not play in Windows or Mac OS 9. They're exclusively for iPhoto's use.
Finally, click the Burn icon again. When the process is done, your Mac spits out the finished CD (named "iPhoto Disc"), ready to use. Later, if you want to view the contents of your finished CD in iPhoto, pop the disc back into the drive.