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4.1. iPhoto: The ApplicationiPhoto approaches digital photo management as a four-step process:
Note: Although much of this book is focused on using digital cameras , remember this: You don't have to shoot digital photos to use iPhoto. You can just as easily use it to organize and publish pictures you've shot with a traditional film camera and then digitized using a scanner (or had Kodak convert them to a Photo CD). Importing scanned photos is covered later in this chapter on page 89. 4.1.1. iPhoto RequirementsAccording to Apple, iPhoto 5 requires a Mac that has a USB (Universal Serial Bus) port, a G3 chip or better, 256 MB of memory or more, and Mac OS X 10.3.4 or later. (A faster chip is required for some editing functions and burning slideshows to DVD.) Tip: The USB port makes it possible to connect a camera or memory card reader for directly importing the photos. But technically, you don't need a USB port, since you can always import photos from the hard drive or a CD, as described later in this chapter. The truth is, iPhoto may be among the most memory-dependent programs on your Mac. It just loves memory. Memory is even more important to iPhoto than your Mac's processor speed. It makes the difference between tolerable speed and sluggishness, or between a 5,000 photo collection and a 25,000-photo collection. So the more memory and horsepower your Mac has, the happier you'll be. Finally, take a look at how much free hard drive space you have. You need at least 250 MB if you're installing only iPhoto, iMovie, and iTunes. If you want iDVD and GarageBand too, iLife will eat up 4.3 GB of disk spacenot including the room you'll need for all your photos. 4.1.2. Getting iPhotoA free version of iPhoto has been included on every Mac sold since January 2002. If your Mac falls into that category, you'll find iPhoto in your Applications folder. (You can tell which version you have by single-clicking its icon and then choosing File Get Info. In the resulting info window, youll see the version number clear as day.) If you bought your Mac after January 2005, you probably have iPhoto 5 installed. Otherwise, it's available only as part of Apple's iLife '05 software suitean $80 DVD that includes GarageBand, iTunes, iMovie HD, iPhoto, and iDVD. You can get the iLife box from www.apple.com/store, from mail-order Web sites, or at local computer stores. When you run the iLife installer, you're offered a choice of programs to install. Install all five programs, if you like (4.3 GB of hard drive space required), or just iPhoto. When the installation process is over, you'll find the iPhoto icon in your Applications folder. (In the Finder, choose Go Applications, or press Shift- -A, to open this folder.) If you're wise, you'll take a moment to drag the iPhoto iconthe little camera superimposed on the palm treeonto your Dock, so you'll be able to open it more conveniently from now on.
4.1.2.1 Upgrading from earlier versionsIf you've used an earlier version of iPhoto, you'd be wise to make a backup of your iPhoto Library folderyour database of photosbefore running iPhoto 5. That's because iPhoto 5's first bit of business is converting that library into a new, more efficient format that's incompatible with earlier iPhotos (see Figure 4-1, bottom). Ordinarily, the upgrade process is seamless: iPhoto smoothly converts and displays your existing photos, comments, titles, and albums. But lightning does strike, fuses do blow, and the technology gods have a cruel sense of humorso making a backup copy before iPhoto 5 converts your old library is very, very smart. To perform this safety measure, open your Home Pictures folder, and then copy or duplicate the iPhoto Library folder. (This folder may be huge, since it contains copies of all the photos youve imported into iPhoto. This is a solid argument for copying it onto a second hard drive, like an iPod, or a burnable DVD.) Now, if anything should go wrong with the conversion process, you'll still have a clean, uncorrupted copy of your iPhoto Library files.
4.1.3. Running iPhoto 5 for the First TimeDouble-click the iPhoto icon to open the program. After you dismiss the "Welcome to iPhoto" dialog box (Figure 4-1, top), iPhoto checks to see if you have an older version and, if so, offers to convert its photo library (Figure 4-1, bottom). Finally, you arrive at the program's main window, the basic elements of which are shown in Figure 4-2.
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