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Mac OS X > Excerpts >

Inside iPhoto: Image Management for Power Shooters
Pages: 1, 2

Exporting Options and Tips

You have so many options for outputting your images in iPhoto it's hard to list them all. As I've mentioned earlier, you can order Kodak prints, create an archival picture book, or quickly pull together a full-screen slide show, complete with background music.



But there's more. If you hit the Share button, you'll see an Export option that gives you three additional options:

  • File Export: particularly handy for creating smaller-size pictures for sending via email.
  • Web Page: automatically generates a thumbnail-driven Web page that you can serve directly from your Mac OS X computer using the built-in Apache Web server.
  • QuickTime: generates a QuickTime slide show for posting on the Web or for burning onto a CD.

These functions work best if you've created a specific collection of pictures in what iPhoto calls an "Album." To create a new album, go to File --> New Album, or hit CMD N. You can also hit the "+" button in the lower left corner of the interface. Then name your album and simply drag pictures from your main Photo Library into it. The photos you place in the album are not removed from your master library; rather, they are copied to the album.

Ordering from Kodak
iPhoto allows you to quickly order Kodak prints from within the application. But there's more! You can also export your images to QuickTime movies, or let iPhoto create Web pages for you (click for larger image).

Now that you have a new subset of pictures in the album, you can make a book, create a QuickTime movie, or generate a Web page.

I don't care much for the QuickTime generator because it doesn't allow me to add transitions or background music. I much prefer LiveSlideShow 2.0 by Totally Hip Software because I can easily create sophisticated QuickTime presentations with it.

But I do think that the Web page export function is handy. The code it generates is pretty clean, and if you add a few lines of your own code to it, you can quickly create a professional-looking picture page directly from iPhoto.

I like to have metadata on all my Web pages, plus my logo, contact information, and links to my home site. So I keep that "template code" on Stickies (the electronic Mac version) and simply paste it into the HTML that iPhoto generates. By doing so, I can create a custom Web page of photos in just a few minutes.

For example, if I replace the first few lines of code that iPhoto generates with something like this: 


<html>
 <head>
  <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1">
	<title>Story Photography: Wedding Album</title>
	<meta name="Story Photography" content="Story Photography, Derrick Story, 
	digital photography, weddings, wedding photography,
        portraits, landscape, multimedia, QuickTime, Photoshop,
        digital cameras, handhelds, PDAs, mobile computing, 
        Sonoma County, San Francisco, technology, conferences">
 </head>
 
 <body>
 
<p><center><a href="http://www.storyphoto.com">
<img height="104" width="255" src="images/storyphoto_header.jpg" 
 border="0" alt="Story Photography Since 1997"></a></center></p>

<p><center> 
<img height="9" width="428" src="images/line_rule.gif" border="0">


<center>
<h2><font face="Arial, Helvetica" color=#000000>Wedding Album
</font></h2>
</center>

then I add this markup at the end of the document: 


<hr color=#1A28A3>
<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=2 color=#000000>
Photos © 2002 Story Photography<br />
Derrick Story, owner<br />
dstory@storyphoto.com -- 
<a href="http://www.storyphoto.com">www.storyphoto.com</a> -- 
(707) 546-8322</font>

I have a custom iPhoto Web page that looks like the sample below. Easy!

Standard Page
This is the default Web page that iPhoto creates. It's useful, but not too pretty (click for larger image).
   Custom Page
By adding a few lines of custom code, you can generate better looking photo pages in just minutes (click for larger image).

Final Thoughts

iPhoto is a Mac OS X application only, and I think it will inspire many to make the move to Apple's new operating system. Since I've been using it, I'm surprised to see how refined the first version release is.

For my upcoming Bioinformatics conference assignment, I'm going to create a new iPhoto Library that I will use solely for that event. This will allow me to easily manage the hundreds of images that I'll be uploading to the Web, make prints, generate Web pages for archiving on CD, and who knows, maybe even create a picture book of the event.

There's a lot more to cover in this feature-rich application. If you'd like a follow-up article, make sure you post a TalkBack stating which features you're interested in learning more about.

Until then, go out there and shoot, shoot, shoot!