10.16. iSync | Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual (Missing Manuals)

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10.15. iPhoto

Once you're hooked on using a digital camera, your free, filmless photos pile up quickly. Before you know it, you have 6,000 pictures of your kid playing soccer. Just organizing and keeping track of all these photos is enough to drive you insane.

Apple's answer to all these problems is iPhoto, a simple and uncluttered program designed to organize, edit, and distribute digital photos without nightmarish hassles. Here's the executive summary of iPhoto 5.

10.15.1. Importing Pictures

Plugging a USB camera into your Mac is the easiest way to transfer pictures into iPhoto. The whole process practically happens by itself.

With your camera turned off, connect it to your Mac using the USB cable that came with it .

iPhoto opens automatically as soon as you switch on the camera (unless you've changed the factory settings in Image Capture).

Note: If this is the first time you've ever run iPhoto, it asks if you always want it to run when you plug in the camera. If you value your time, say yes.
Turn on the camera .

iPhoto detects that there are new photos available for download. The entire screen changes to show you a "Ready to import" message, and your camera's icon appears in the Source list at the left side.
If you like, type in a roll name and description for the pictures you're about to import .

Each time you import a new set of photos into iPhotowhether from your hard drive, a camera, or a memory cardthat batch of imported photos is called a film roll .

Typing in a name for each new batch as you import it Disney, First Weekend, Baby Meets Lasagna will help you organize and find your pictures later on. Use the Description box for more elaborate textual blurbs, if you like. You could specify who was on the trip, the circumstances of the shoot, and so on.
Turn on "Delete items from camera after importing," if you like .

If you turn on this box, iPhoto automatically deletes all photos from your camera's memory card once they're safely on the Mac. Your card is now ready for you to fill with more pictures. (iPhoto doesn't delete your pictures until after it has successfully copied them all to the Photo Library.)
Click the Import button .

If you chose the auto-erase feature, you see a final "Confirm Move" dialog box, affording you one last chance to back out of that decision.

A different message appears if you're about to import photos you've already imported, offering to skip the duplicates.

In any case, iPhoto swings into action, copying each photo from your camera to your hard drive. You get to see them as they parade by.

When the process is over, your freshly imported photos appear in the main iPhoto window, awaiting your organizational talents. You can now turn off your camera and unplug it.

Tip: You can also import photos, or even folders or disks full of them, by dragging their icons (or the disk or folder icons) directly into the iPhoto window.

10.15.2. Organizing Photos

You now see a neatly arranged grid of thumbnails (Figure 10-22). You're looking at what iPhoto refers to as your 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 .

Figure 10-22. Meet iPhoto. The large photoviewing area is where thumbnails of your imported photos appear. The icons at the bottom of the window represent all the stuff you can do with your photos. The lower-left corner can show you information, a list of keywords, or the iPhoto calendar (click to see photos taken during a certain day, week, or month).

10.15.2.1. Last Roll

Most of the time, you'll probably work with the photos that you just downloaded from your camera. That's the purpose of the roll-of-film icon called Last Roll. With one click, iPhoto displays only your most recent photos, hiding all the others. To return to the grand overview of all your pictures, click the Library icon at the top of the Source list.

10.15.2.2. Deleting photos

As every photographer knows make that every good photographernot every photo is a keeper. To delete a photo, click its icon and then press the Delete key. Instead of deleting the photo immediately, iPhoto lets it sit there in the Trash, awaiting permanent disposal via the Empty Trash command.

Whatever pictures you erase this way also disappear from any albums you've created. (Deleting a photo from an album is different, as described in a moment.)

10.15.2.3. Albums

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 Source list.

(If you've used playlists in iTunes or folders 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 .

Tip: You can also plop several albums into a single folder in order to tidy up your Source list. Create a folder by choosing File

New Folder.

New Album ( -N), or click the + button in the iPhoto window, below the album list. A dialog box appears. Type in a descriptive name ( Yellowstone 2005, Edna in Paris , or whatever), click OK, and watch as a new photo album icon appears in the Source list. (See Figure 10-23.)

Tip: You can also drag a thumbnail (or a batch of them) from the photo-viewing area directly into an empty portion of the Source list. In a flashwell, in about three secondsiPhoto creates a new album for you, named Album-1 (or whatever number it's up to). The photos you dragged are automatically dumped inside.In fact, you can drag a bunch of graphics files, or a folder full, from the desktop into the Source list. In one step, iPhoto imports the photos, creates a new photo album, names it after the folder you dragged in (if that's how you did it), and puts the newly imported photos into that album.

Figure 10-23. There's no limit to the number of albums you can add, so make as many as you need to logically organize all the photos in your Photo Library. New albums are always added to the end of the list, but you can change the order in which they appear by simply dragging them up or down in the list.

To rename an album, double-click its name or icon (or, if it's already highlighted, just press Return). 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 actually 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.

10.15.2.4. Deleting photos or albums

To remove a photo from an album, click the album name to view its contents, click the photo you want to remove, and then press Delete. The thumbnail disappears from the album, but it's not really gone from iPhoto.

To delete a selected album , choose Photos Delete Album or press the Delete key. Deleting an album doesnt delete any photos, just the references to those photos. Even if you delete all your albums, your Photo Library remains intact.

10.15.3. Editing

The easiest way to open a photo for editing is to double-click its thumbnail (or highlight it and then click the Edit button at the bottom of the window). Unless you've changed iPhoto's settings, the photo opens in the main iPhoto window, scaled to fit into the viewing area.

iPhoto aficionados prefer, however, to use iPhoto's much smarter , but less obvious, methods that open each picture in its own window . For example, you can:

Choose iPhoto Preferences and, on the General pane, change the photo-opening setting. Under the "Double-click photo:" heading, select the "Opens photo in edit window button. Then close the dialog box.
Control-click a photo. Choose "Edit in separate window" from the shortcut menu. (If you choose "Edit in external editor," you can edit the photo in another programPhotoshop, for example, or whatever program you chose in the Preferences dialog box described above.)

When a photo opens in its own window, you can look at multiple full-size images at the same timea critical feature when comparing a series of similar shots. And you can keep your other thumbnails in view, allowing you to easily open additional photos without closing the ones you already have open.

Opening a photo also summons these editing tools:
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 daguerreotype look.
Adjust . Opens the new Adjust panel, whose sliders offer ridiculous amounts of control over color balance, exposure, and other parameters (Figure 10-24). (Some of its sliders are unavailable on Macs with G3 processors.)

Tip: By pressing and releasing the Control key, you can toggle between the "before" and "after" versions of the photo to assess the results of the enhancement. Remember, too, that no matter what changes you make to a photo, you can always restore it to its original camera conditioneven years laterby clicking it and then choosing Photos

Revert to Original. Thats a nice safety net, indeed.

Figure 10-24. Top: Here's a promising landscape shot, along with its histograma self-updating visual representation of the dark and light tones that make up your photograph. The amount of the photo's darker shades appears toward the left side of the graph; the lighter tones are graphed on the right side. Unfortunately, in this shot, much of the tonal information is bunched in the middle of the graph. As a result, the photo looks a little "flat," without much contrast.
Bottom: Step one in the repair job, then, is to move the Exposure slider a little to the right to improve the midtones. Because the graph in the histogram is elongated as a result, you've also improved the contrast.

10.15.4. Sharing Your Pix

The payoff for all of this organizational effort is, of course, showing your photos to other people. iPhoto is endlessly talented in this department. After you select some photos or an album, here are the bottom-of-the-screen icons you can click:

10.15.4.1. Print

iPhoto can print out your photos on standard sizes of inkjet photo paper, or you can use a template that clusters several photos onto each sheet, saving paper and ink.

10.15.4.2. Slideshow

Onscreen slideshows are easy to set up, they're free, and they make your photos look fantastic. The Mac presents the pictures in full-screen modeno windows , no menus , no borderswith your images filling every inch of the monitor. Each picture fades gently into the next , producing a smooth, cinematic effect. If you want, you can even add a musical soundtrack to accompany the presentation. And if you wiggle the mouse, you get a control bar that lets you rotate, delete, or rate each photo as it goes by.

Starting in iPhoto 5, you can try three different kinds of slideshows:

Instant . Click an album (or highlight a group of thumbnails), and then Option-click the Play button under the Info pane. A moment later, your Mac's screen fades to black and the show begins. If this is the first time you've triggered a slideshow from this album, J. S. Bach's Minuet in G plays in the background. When you've had enough, click the mouse or press almost any key.

Figure 10-25. In this dialog box, you can adjust how fast the slides change, how you want the show to repeat, and which song (from your iTunes collection) you want as the slideshow's soundtrack. (Use the Music tab to choose any playlists that you've already created using iTunes, or hand pick them right here in iPhoto.)

Quick . If you click the Play button (instead of Option-clicking), you get a dialog box where you can fine-tune the timing and music of the slideshow (Figure 10-25).
Saved . A saved slideshow appears as an icon in your Source list. The beauty of this system is that you can tweak a slideshow to deathyou can even set up different transitions, zooming characteristics, and speed settings for each individual slideand then save all your work as an independent clickable icon, ready for playback whenever you've got company.

The key to all of this is the Slideshow icon at the bottom of the iPhoto window. It tosses you into the Slideshow editing mode, which has some features of Edit mode and some features of regular old thumbnail-organizing mode.

10.15.4.3. Email

Full-size photos are usually too big to email. They take forever to download, they run the risk of exceeding your recipient's Inbox limit, and they open up much too large on your victims' screens. Fortunately, iPhoto can automatically send a scaled-down, reasonably sized version of your photo instead.

Start by choosing the email program you use in the iPhoto Preferences General pane, and then close the window. Next, highlight the photos you want to send, and click the Email icon on the panel at the bottom of the iPhoto window. In the resulting dialog box, choose a size for your photos. "Medium (640 x 480)" yields a file that will fill a nice chunk of your recipients screen, with plenty of detail.

Finally, click Compose. iPhoto processes your photos and then opens your email program, creates a new message, and attaches your photos to it. Just type your recipient's email address into the "To:" box, and then click Send.

10.15.4.4. Order prints

This option uploads your selected photos andfor a feeconverts them into handsome Kodak prints that get mailed back to you.

10.15.4.5. Book

iPhoto's Book feature lets you design and order (via the Internet) a gorgeous, linencovered, 8.5-x-11-inch hardbound bookor a softcover book in any of three sizes. All books are printed at a real bindery and shipped back to you in a slipcover. Your photos are printed on the glossy, acid-free, single- or double-sided pages, complete with captions, if you like.

Book prices start at $10. 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 (Figure 10-22), or choose File New Book. Now you see something like Figure 10-26: 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.

Figure 10-26. You can change these settings later, even after you've started laying out your book's pages. But if you have the confidence to make these decisions now, you'll save time, effort, and (if you want captions for your photos) possibly a lot of typing.

Finally, you're asked this important question: 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 automatically arranges photos, in the sequence you've specified, on successive pages of the book. (You can always touch up the layout afterward.)
Manually . If you click Manually, iPhoto creates an entire book for you, complete with attractively arranged pagesbut 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.

When you make your choice, two 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 10-27. The page you're working on 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 pages (more on this in a moment); that's the photo browser . iPhoto has just turned into a page-layout program.

Figure 10-27. In Book mode, 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 you're working on, 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.

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

Choose a Page Type . iPhoto always proposes 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.

If you approve of the photos-per-page proposal, great. 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. It's a list of the different page designs that Apple has drawn up to fit the overall design theme you've selected: Cover, Introduction, One (photo per page), Two (photos), and so on.
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. It contains tiny thumbnail representations of the various photo layouts available.
Lay out the book . The key to understanding iPhoto 5's book-layout mode is realizing that all photos are draggable (Figure 10-28). You can swap two photos by dragging one directly on top of the other; 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 (which makes its icon move up into the unplaced-photos area); add an unplaced photo to a page by dragging it out of the unplaced-photos browser onto a blank spot of the page; fill in an empty gray placeholder frame by dragging a photo onto it from the unplaced-photos area; and so on.

Tip: You can also 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." 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.

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

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.
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 blowing a bunch of money on a one-shot deal, you'd be wise to proofread and inspect it from every possible angle, either by printing it (File Print) or by saving it as a PDF file (choose File Print and, from the PDF pop-up button, clicking the Save as PDF button).

When you think your book is ready for birth, click Buy Book. After several minutes of converting your screen design into an Internet-transmittable file, iPhoto offers you a dialog box where you can choose a cover color (hardback books only), indicate the quantity, and place your order.

10.15.4.6. HomePage

If you have a .Mac account, you can turn an album or a selection of photos into an instant gallery on your Web page, complete with fast-downloading 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.

Tip: If you already have a Web site (not a .Mac account), you can also generate an online gallery by choosing Share

Export and clicking the Web Page tab. iPhoto saves, to your hard drive, a complete set of HTML documents and linked, nested folders (containing both thumbnails and full-size images), ready to upload to your site. (You just wont have access to all of Apple's canned design schemes.)

Figure 10-28. 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 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.

10.15.4.7. .Mac slides

When you send your photos out into the world as .Mac slides, other people who use Mac OS X can subscribe to your show, displaying your pictures as their screen saver.

To create a .Mac slideshow, select the album or photos you want to share, and then choose Share .Mac Slides. Click Publish to upload your photos. When the process is complete, click Announce Slideshow to email your friends about your slides.

To view someone else's .Mac slideshow, see Section 9.10.2.1.

10.15.4.8. Desktop (or screen saver)

This button plasters any selected photo onto your desktop as a wallpaper background. Neat!

If you select multiple photos (or an album), this button opens up the Desktop & Screen Saver pane of System Preferences. If you leave the Desktop pane selected, the photos become a self-changing desktop background, alternating every 30 minutes (or whatever you choose from the pop-up menu).

If you click the Screen Saver button instead, they become grist for the Mac OS X screen saver. Wait long enough, and they'll appear all by themselves, in gorgeous, panning, cross-fading fashion.

10.15.4.9. 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 copy of iPhoto 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.

Note: The Burn Disc button doesn't start out installed at the bottom of the iPhoto screen. Use the Share

Show in Toolbar submenu to specify which icons appear there.

button). If the set of photos you want to burn is larger than 650 or 700 megabytes (for a CD) or about 4.3 gigabytes (for a single-layer DVD), it's not going to fit. You'll have to split your backup operation across multiple discs. Select whatever number of photo albums or individual pictures that will fit on a single disc. After burning the first disc, select the next set of photos, and then burn another CD or DVD.

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 disc in iPhoto, pop it back into the drive. The icon for the disc appears in the Source list of the iPhoto window. If you click the icon, the photos it contains appear in the photo-viewing area, just as if they were stored in your Photo Library.

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