7.15. Customizing the Shoebox iPhoto starts out looking just the way you probably see it now, with each picture displayed as a small thumbnail against a plain white background. This view makes it easy to browse through photos and work with iPhoto's various tools. But hey, this is your digital shoebox. With a little tweaking and fine-tuning, you can completely customize the way iPhoto displays your photos. Start with a visit to iPhoto  Preferences and click the Appearance button.
Tip: You can open the iPhoto Preferences window at any time by pressing  -, (comma). This keystroke is blissfully consistent across all the iLife programs.
7.15.1. Changing the View The controls in the Appearance panel of the Preferences window let you make some pretty significant changes to the overall look of your Photo Library. See Figure 7-20 for an example. Here are your options: -
Add or remove a border or shadow . The factory setting, Drop Shadow, puts a soft black shadow behind each thumbnail in the photo-viewing pane, a subtle touch that gives your Photo Library an elegant 3-D look. As pretty as this effect is, however, there's also a decent reason to turn it off : It slows iPhoto down slightly, as the program has to continually redraw or resize those fancy shadows behind each thumbnail whenever you scroll or zoom. Switch to either the Border or No Border setting and you'll be rewarded with faster scrolling and smoother zooming whenever you change the size of thumbnails (as described in the next section). The Border setting puts a thin white frame around each picture. You won't see this border unless you change the background color , as explained in the next paragraph.  | Figure 7-20. Here's a typical Library with a very different look. Instead of the usual white background with drop- shadowed thumbnails, this view presents large thumbnails, with borders, against a dark gray background. The Source list is hidden, but the titles for each photo are displayed. | |
 | Figure 7-21. The "Align to grid" option does nothing if all photos have the same orientation. But with mixed horizontal and vertical images, photos stay in strict rows and columns (right) despite their shape differences. At left:- an "unaligned" version of the same thumbnails. | |
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Change the background color . Right under the No Border radio button, a slider lets you adjust the background color of the photo-viewing pane. Actually, the term "color" is a bit of an overstatement, since your choices only include white, black, or any shade of gray in between. Not exactly a rainbow of colors. -
Adjust the Alignment . Turn on the"Align photos to grid"checkbox if you want the thumbnails in your Photo Library to snap into evenly spaced rows and columns, even if your collection includes thumbnails of varying sizes and orientations, as shown in Figure 7-21. -
Change the date order . Turning on "Place most recent photos at the top" puts them at the top of the main iPhoto window. It's sort of like seeing your most recent email messages at the top of your inbox. If you turn this checkbox off, you'll have to scroll all the way down to see your most recent pictures. -
Choose text size . The pop-up menu at the bottom of the Appearance panel lets you choose Small or Large for the album names in the Source list, depending on your eyesight. As for keywords and the other text in the iPhoto window, you're stuck with one sizetiny. 7.15.2. Showing/Hiding Keywords, Titles, and Film Roll Info If you want to display thumbnails along with the titles and keywords you assign your pictures using iPhoto, you can switch these view options on or off by choosing View Titles (Shift- -T) and View Keywords (Shift- -K). Titles and keywords appear under each thumbnail. As with most of iPhoto, your formatting options are limited. You can't control the font, style, color, or size of this text. Your only choice is to either display the title and keywords or to keep them hidden.  |
