Chapter 3: Focusing on iPhoto

In This Chapter

Importing pictures from your hard drive or digital camera

Organizing images with iPhoto

Tweaking the appearance of photographs

Sharing photos with your friends

For years, the Macintosh has been the choice of professional photographers for working with digital images — not surprising, considering the Mac’s graphical nature. Apple continues this tradition with iPhoto, a photography tool for the home user that can help you organize, edit, and even publish your photographs. (It sports more features than a handful of Swiss army knives.) After you shoot your photos with a digital camera, you can import them into iPhoto, edit them, and publish them. You’re not limited to photos that you take yourself, either; you can edit, publish, and organize all kinds of digital image files. You can even create a photo album and use the iPhoto interface to order a handsome soft- or hard-bound copy shipped to you.

In this chapter, I walk you through an overview of what iPhoto can do. After that, I give you a brief tour of the controls within iPhoto so that you can see what features are available to you, including features for managing, printing, and publishing your photos.

Delving into iPhoto

In Figure 3-1, you can see most of the major controls offered in iPhoto ’09. (Other controls automatically appear when you enter different modes; I cover them in upcoming sections of this chapter.)

Although these controls and sections of the window are covered in more detail in the following sections, here’s a quick rundown of what you’re looking at:

♦ Source list: This list of image locations determines which photos iPhoto displays.

• You can choose to display either your entire image library or just the last “roll” of digital images that you downloaded from your camera.

• You can create new albums of your own that appear in the Source list; albums make it much easier to organize your photos.

• Photos can be grouped by Event (when they were taken), Faces (who appears in the photos), and Places (where photos were taken).

• You can create books, calendars, cards, and slideshows.

♦ Viewer: This pane displays the images from the currently selected photo source.

You can drag or click to select photos in the Viewer for further tricks, such as assigning keywords and image editing.

♦ Create button: Click this button to add a new blank album, smart album, MobileMe gallery, book, calendar, card, or slideshow to your Source list.

♦ Get Info button: Click this button to display information on the currently selected photos.

♦ Enter Full Screen button: Click this button to switch to a full-screen display of your photos. In full-screen mode, the images in the selected album appear in a film strip across the top of the screen, and you can click one to view that image using your Mac’s entire screen real estate. You can also use the same controls that I discuss later in this chapter for editing and adjusting images; just move the mouse cursor to the top edge of the full-screen display to show the menu or to the bottom edge to show the editing toolbar.

♦ Play Slideshow: Select an event, album, book or slideshow in the Source list (or multiple images you’ve selected in the Viewer) and click this button to start a full-screen slideshow using those images.

♦ Search box: Click the button next to the Search text box to locate photos by specific criteria, or just click in the box and start typing to search by description and title.

♦ Toolbar buttons: This group of buttons selects an operation you want to perform on the images you’ve selected in the Viewer. (Note that the toolbar buttons you see may depend on your screen resolution.)

♦ Thumbnail Resize slider: Drag this slider to the left to reduce the size of the thumbnails in the Viewer. This allows you to see more thumbnails at one time, which is a great boon for quick visual searches. Drag the slider to the right to expand the size of the thumbnails, which makes it easier to differentiate details between similar photos in the Viewer.

Working with Images in iPhoto

Even a superbly designed image display and editing application, such as iPhoto ’09, would look overwhelming if everything were jammed into one window. Thus, Apple’s developers provide different operation modes (such as editing and book creation) that you can use in the one iPhoto window. Each mode allows you to perform different tasks, and you can switch modes at just about any time by clicking the corresponding toolbar button.

In this section, I discuss three of these modes — import, organize, and edit — and what you can do when you’re in them. Then I conclude the chapter with sections on publishing and sharing your images.

Import Images 101

In import mode, you’re ready to download images directly from your digital camera — as long as your specific camera model is supported in iPhoto. You can find out which cameras are supported by visiting the Apple iPhoto support page at www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/cameras.html.

Follow these steps to import images:

1. Connect your digital camera to your Mac.

Plug one end of a USB cable into your camera and the other end into your Mac’s USB port, and prepare your camera to download images.

2. Launch iPhoto.

Your Mac will probably launch iPhoto automatically when your camera is detected, but you can always launch iPhoto manually by clicking its icon in the Dock (or in your Applications folder).

3. Type an event name for the imported photos, such as Birthday Party or Godzilla Ravages Tokyo.

4. Type a description for the Event.

5. To allow iPhoto to automatically separate images into separate events based on the date they were taken, click the Autosplit Events after Importing check box to select it.

6. Click the Import All button to import your photographs from the camera.

The images are added to your Photo Library, where you can organize them as you wish.

To select specific images to import, hold down the Ô key and click each desired photo; then click Import Selected instead of Import All.

7. Specify whether the images you’re importing should be deleted from the camera afterward.

If you don’t expect to download these images again to another computer or another device, you can choose to delete the photos from your camera automatically. This saves you a step, frees space for new photos and helps eliminate the guilt that can crop up when you nix your pix. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

“What’s that about an Event, Mark?” After you download the contents of your digital camera, those contents count as a virtual Event in iPhoto — based on either the date that you imported them or the date they were taken. For example, you can always display the last images you imported by clicking Last Import. If you want to see photos from your son’s graduation, they appear as a separate Event. (Both of these organizational tools will appear in the Source list). Think about that . . . it’s pretty tough to arrange old-fashioned film prints by the moment in time that they document, but iPhoto makes it easy for you to see just which photos are part of the same group! I explain more about Events in the next section.

There are four methods of organizing photos: the album, which you may be familiar with from older versions of iPhoto, Events, Faces, and Places.

Organize mode: Organizing and sorting your images

In the days of film prints, you could always stuff another shoebox with your latest photos or buy another sticky album to expand your library. Your digital camera, though, stores images as files instead, and many folks don’t print their digital photographs. Instead, you can keep your entire collection of digital photographs and scanned images well ordered and easily retrieved by using iPhoto’s organize mode. Then you can display them as a slideshow, print them to your system printer, use them as Desktop backgrounds, or burn them to an archive disc.

A new kind of photo album

The most familiar method of organizing images in iPhoto is the album. Each album can represent any division you like, be it a year, a vacation, your daughter, or your daughter’s ex-boyfriends. Follow these steps:

1. Create a new album.

You can either choose File⇒New Album or click the plus (+) button at the bottom of the Source list. Click the Album button at the top of the sheet to display the settings you see in Figure 3-2.

2. Type the name for your new photo album.

If you want to create an empty album (without automatically including any images that might be selected), make sure you click the Use Selected Items in New Album check box to deselect it.

3. Click OK.

iPhoto also offers a special type of album called a Smart Album, which you can create from the File menu. A Smart Album contains only photos that match certain criteria that you choose, using the keywords and rating that you assign your images. Other criteria text in the photo filenames, dates the images were added to iPhoto, and any comments you might have added. Now here’s the really nifty angle: iPhoto automatically builds and maintains Smart Albums for you, adding new photos that match the criteria (and deleting those that you remove from your Photo Library)! Smart Albums carry a gear icon in the Source list.

You can display information about the currently selected item in the information pane under the Source list. Just click the Show Information button at the bottom of the iPhoto window, which sports the familiar “i-in-a-circle” logo. You can also type a short note or description in the Description box that appears in the Information pane. For more in-depth information, select the desired item and then press Ô+I.

You can also change information on an image by selecting it in the Viewer and clicking the Show Information button. Click any of the headings in the pane (Title, Date, Time, and so on) to display a text edit box, and you can simply click in either box to type a new name or alter the photo’s date stamp.

You can drag images from the Viewer into any album you choose. For example, you can copy an image to another album by dragging it from the Viewer to the desired album in the Source list.

To remove a photo that has fallen out of favor, follow these steps:

1. In the Source list, select the desired album.

2. In the Viewer, select the photo (click it) that you want to remove.

3. Press Delete.

When you remove a photo from an album, you don’t remove the photo from your collection (which is represented by the Photos entry under the Library heading in the Source list). That’s because an album is just a group of links to the images in your collection. To completely remove the offending photo from iPhoto, click the Photos entry under the Library heading to display your entire collection of images and delete the picture there, too.

To remove an entire album from the Source list, just click it in the Source list to select it — in the Viewer, you can see the images that it contains — and then press Delete. (Alternatively, right-click or Control-click the offending album and choose Delete Album from the pop-up menu.)

To rename an album, click the entry under the Albums heading in the Source list to select it and then click again to display a text box. Type the new album name and press Return.

Change your mind? Daughter’s ex is back in the picture, so to speak? iPhoto comes complete with a handy-dandy Undo feature. Just press Ô+Z, and it’s as though your last action never happened. (A great trick for those moments when you realize you just deleted your only image of your first car from your Library.)

Arranging stuff by Events

As I mention earlier, Events are essentially a group of images that you shot or downloaded at the same time — iPhoto figures that those images belong together (which is usually a pretty safe assumption). Figure 3-3 illustrates some of the Events I’ve created in my iPhoto collection.

As can an album, an Event can be renamed — you just use a different procedure. Click the Events entry under the Library heading in the Source list to display your Events in the Viewer; then click the existing Event name in the caption underneath the thumbnail. A text box appears in which you can type a new name; click Return to update the Event.

Try moving your mouse cursor over an Event thumbnail in the Viewer and you’ll see that iPhoto displays the date range when the images were taken, as well as the total number of images in the Event. Ah, but things get really cool when you move your mouse cursor back and forth over an Event with many images: The thumbnail animates and displays all the images in the Event, without your using old-fashioned scroll bars or silly arrows! (Why can’t I think of this stuff? This is the future, dear readers.)

Notice that “i-in-a-circle” that appears when you hover your mouse cursor over an Event thumbnail? Click it to display the location where the shot was taken, using the Places feature I describe in a page or two.

To display the contents of an Event in the Viewer, just double-click the Event thumbnail. To return to the Events thumbnails, click the All Events button at the top of the Viewer.

Decided to merge those Prom Event pictures with your daughter’s Graduation Event? No problem! You could drag one Event thumbnail on top of another, but that’s the easy way. Alternatively, click the Events entry under the Library heading in the Source list to display your Events and then hold down Ô while you click the Events that you want to merge. Click the Merge button in the toolbar at the bottom of the window, or click Events⇒Merge Events. (Forgot about that menu bar, didn’t you?) Click Merge in the confirmation dialog that appears.

Whilst organizing, you can create a brand-new empty Event by clicking Events⇒Create Event. Feel free to drag photos from albums, other Events, or your Photo library into your new Event.

Working with Faces and Places

iPhoto ’09 includes two new organizational tools called Faces and Places. These two categories now appear in the Library section of the Source list.

Putting names to faces:

First, let’s tackle Faces. This feature is a sophisticated recognition system that automatically recognizes human faces within the photos that you add to your Library. (I don’t know whether it works well with pets — but you can try, anyway.) Naturally, you have to identify faces first before iPhoto can recognize them, which it does through a process called tagging.

To tag a face, follow these steps:

1. In the Source list, click the Photos item to display your image library.

2. In the Viewer, click the photo with a person you want to tag.

The photo is selected, as indicated by the yellow border.

3. Click the Name button in the iPhoto toolbar at the bottom of the window.

iPhoto displays the tagging pane you see in Figure 3-4. Note that iPhoto has indicated each person’s face in the photo with a label.

4. If the face is unrecognized (labeled as unnamed), click the label to open a text box and type the person’s name.

If iPhoto recognizes the face correctly and the name matches the person, click the check mark to confirm the tag. If the face is incorrectly identified, click the X and you can enter a new name.

If the name appears on an Address Book contact card, you can click the matching entry that appears to confirm the identity. Wowzers!

If iPhoto doesn’t recognize a face at all in the photo (which can happen if the person’s face is turned at an angle to the camera, or is in a darker area of the photo), click the Add Missing Face button, and iPhoto places a box in the center of the image. Drag the photo over the person’s face. If necessary, you can resize the box using the four handles at the corner of the box. Now you can click the label and type the person’s name.

5. Press Return to save the face.

Notice the expansion button that appears next to the person’s name? Click it, and iPhoto displays other photos that likely contain this person’s face, allowing you to tag them there as well.

6. Click Done after you’ve identified all the faces in the photo.

After you’ve tagged an image, it appears in your Faces collection, which you can view by clicking the Faces entry in the Source list. You can click a portrait in your Faces collection to see all the images that contain that person. As you might expect, the more tags you add for a specific person, the better iPhoto gets at recognizing that person!

Putting photos in their place:

Places makes it easy to track the location where photos were taken, but it requires a digital camera that includes GPS tracking information in the image metadata. (This is a relatively new feature for digital cameras, so older models aren’t likely to support GPS tracking.) Places also requires an Internet connection, because it uses Google Maps.

Click the Places entry in the Source list to display a global map, with pushpins indicating where your photos were taken. You can switch the Places map between terrain and satellite modes, or choose a hybrid display. If you’re familiar with Google Maps, these settings are old friends of yours.

Alternatively, click the List View button to display a character-based browser, where you can click on country, state, and city names.

No matter which view mode you choose, clicking a pushpin or location displays the images taken in that area.

Organizing with keywords

“Okay, Mark, albums, Events, Faces, and Places are great ideas, but there has to be a way to search my collection by category!” Never fear, good Mac owner. You can also assign descriptive keywords to images to help you organize your collection and locate certain pictures fast. iPhoto comes with a number of standard keywords, and you can create your own as well.

To illustrate, suppose you’d like to identify your images according to special events in your family. Birthday photos should have their own keyword, and anniversaries deserve another. By assigning keywords, you can search for Elsie’s sixth birthday or your silver wedding anniversary (no matter what Event or album they’re in), and all related photos with those keywords appear like magic! (Well, almost like magic. You need to choose View⇒Keywords, which toggles the Keyword display on and off in the Viewer.)

iPhoto includes a number of keywords that are already available:

♦ Favorite

♦ Family

♦ Kids

♦ Vacation

♦ Birthday

♦ Movie

♦ Checkmark

What’s the Checkmark all about, you ask? It’s a special case: Adding this keyword displays a tiny check mark icon in the bottom-right corner of the image. The checkmark keyword comes in handy for temporarily identifying specific images because you can search for just your checkmarked photos.

To assign keywords to images (or remove keywords that have already been assigned), select one or more photos in the Viewer. Choose Window⇒Show Keywords or press Ô+K to display the Keywords window, as shown in Figure 3-5.

Click the keyword buttons that you want to attach to the selected images to mark them. Or click the highlighted keyword buttons that you want to remove from the selected images to disable them.

Digging through your library with keywords

Behold the power of keywords! To sift through your entire collection of images by using keywords, click the magnifying glass button next to the Search box at the bottom of the iPhoto window and then choose Keyword from the pop-up menu. iPhoto displays a pop-up Keywords panel, and you can click one or more keyword buttons to display just the photos that carry those keywords.

The images that remain in the Viewer after a search must have all the keywords that you specified. If an image is identified, for example, by only three of four keywords you chose, it isn’t a match and it doesn’t appear in the Viewer. (You can create a Smart Album with specific keywords to get around this limitation.)

To search for a photo by words in its description, just click in the Search box and start typing. You can also click that same magnifying glass by the Search box to search through your images by date and rating as well.

Speaking of ratings . . .

Playing favorites by assigning ratings

Be your own critic! iPhoto allows you to assign any photo a rating of anywhere from zero to five stars. I use this system to help me keep track of the images that I feel are the best in my library. Select one (or more) image and then assign a rating using one of the following methods:

♦ Choose Photos⇒My Rating and then choose the desired rating from the pop-up submenu.

♦ Use the Ô+0 through Ô+5 shortcuts.

Sorting your images just so

The View menu provides an easy way to arrange your images in the Viewer by a number of different criteria. Choose View⇒Sort Photos and then click the desired sort criteria from the pop-up submenu. You can arrange the display by date, keyword, title, or rating. If you select an album in the source list, you can also choose to arrange photos manually, which means that you can drag and drop thumbnails in the Viewer to place them in the precise order you want them.

Naturally, iPhoto allows you to print selected images, but you can also send photos directly to iWeb for use on your MobileMe Web site. Click Share⇒Send to iWeb and then choose either Photo Page or Blog from the submenu. iPhoto automatically sends the selected images or album to iWeb and launches the application! You can also use iPhoto’s Web Gallery feature to get your photos on the Web. (More on the Web Gallery at the end of this chapter.)

Edit mode: Removing and fixing stuff the right way

Not every digital image is perfect — just look at my collection if you need proof. For those shots that need a pixel massage, iPhoto includes a number of editing tools that you can use to correct common problems.

The first step in any editing job is to select the image you want to fix in the Viewer. Then click the Edit button on the iPhoto toolbar to switch to the Edit mode controls, as shown in Figure 3-6. Now you’re ready to fix problems, using the tools that I discuss in the rest of this section. (If you’re editing a photo that’s part of an Event, album, Faces, or Places, note the spiffy scrolling photo strip at the top, which allows you to switch to another image to edit from the same grouping.)

When you’re done with Edit mode, click the . . . (wait for it) . . . Done button!

Rotating tipped-over shots

If an image is in the wrong orientation and needs to be turned to display correctly, click the Rotate button to turn it once in a counterclockwise direction. Hold down the Option key while you click the Rotate button to rotate in a clockwise direction.

Crop ’til you drop

Does that photo have an intruder hovering around the edges of the subject? You can remove some of the border by cropping an image, just as folks once did with film prints and a pair of scissors. (We’ve come a long way.) With iPhoto, you can remove unwanted portions of an image; it’s a great way to get Uncle Milton’s stray head (complete with toupee) out of an otherwise perfect holiday snapshot.

Follow these steps to crop an image:

1. Click the Crop button in the Edit toolbar.

2. Select the portion of the image that you want to keep.

In the Viewer, click and drag the handles on the rectangle to outline the part of the image that you want. Remember, whatever’s outside this rectangle disappears after the crop is completed.

When you drag a corner or edge of the outline, a semi-opaque grid (familiar to amateur and professional photographers as the nine squares from the Rule of Three) appears to help you visualize what you’re claiming. (Check it out in Figure 3-7.)

3. (Optional) Choose a preset aspect ratio.

If you want to force your cropped selection to a specific aspect ratio — such as 4 x 3 for an iDVD project — click the Constrain check box and select that ratio from the Constrain pop-up menu.

4. Click the Apply button.

Oh, and don’t forget that you can use iPhoto’s Undo feature if you mess up and need to try again. Just press Ô+Z.

iPhoto features multiple Undo levels, so you can press Ô+Z several times to travel back through your last several changes.

Straightening what’s crooked

Was your camera slightly tilted when you took the perfect shot? Never fear! Click the Straighten button and then drag the slider to tilt the image in the desired direction. Click the Close button to return to Edit mode.

Enhancing images to add pizzazz

If a photo looks washed out, click the Enhance button to increase (or decrease) the color saturation and improve the contrast. Enhance is automatic, so you don’t have to set anything.

Removing rampant red-eye

Unfortunately, today’s digital cameras can still produce the same “zombies with red eyeballs” as traditional film cameras. Red-eye is caused by a camera’s flash reflecting off the retinas of a subject’s eyes, and it can occur with both humans and animals. (I’m told that pets get green-eye, actually, but iPhoto can handle that, too!)

iPhoto can remove that red- and green-eye and turn frightening zombies back into your family and friends! Click the Red-Eye button and then select a demonized eyeball by clicking in the center of it. (If the new eyeball is too small or too large, drag the Size slider to adjust the dimensions.) To complete the process, click the X in the button that appears in the image.

Retouching like the stars

The iPhoto Retouch feature is perfect for removing minor flecks or lines in an image (especially those you’ve scanned from prints). Click Retouch and you’ll notice that the mouse cursor turns into a crosshair; just drag the cursor across the imperfection.

Switching to black-and-white or sepia

Ever wonder whether a particular photo in your library would look better as a black-and-white (or grayscale) print? Or perhaps an old-fashioned sepia tone in shades of copper and brown? Just click the Effects button to display the Effects window, which offers eight different effects you can apply to the photo.

Adjusting photo properties manually

Click Adjust to perform manual adjustments to brightness and contrast (the light levels in your image), as well as the sharpness, shadow, and highlight levels. To adjust a value, make sure that nothing’s selected in the image and then drag the corresponding slider until the image looks the way you want. Click the Close button to return to Edit mode.

While you’re editing, you can use the Next and Previous buttons at the lower-right corner of the iPhoto window to move to the next image in the current group (or back to the previous image).

Producing Your Own Coffee-Table Masterpiece

Book mode unleashes what I think is probably the coolest feature of iPhoto: the chance to design and print a high-quality bound photo book! After you complete an album — all the images have been edited just the way you want, and the album contains all the photos you want to include in your book — iPhoto can send your images as data over the Internet to a company that prints and binds your finished book for you. (No, they don’t publish For Dummies titles, but then again, I don’t get high-resolution color plates in most of my books, either.)

At the time of this writing, you can order many different sizes and bindings, including an 8.5-by-11-inch soft-cover book with 20 double-sided pages for about $20 and a hardbound 8.5-by-11-inch keepsake album with 10 double-sided pages for about $30 (shipping included for both). Extra pages can be added at $0.70 and $1.00 a pop, respectively.

iPhoto ’09 can also produce and automatically order calendars and greeting cards, using a process similar to the one I describe in this section for producing a book. Who needs that stationery store in the mall anymore?

If you’re going to create a photo book, make sure that the images have the highest quality and highest resolution. The higher the resolution, the better the photos look in the finished book. I personally always try to use images of over 1,000 pixels in both the vertical and horizontal dimensions.

To create a photo book, follow these steps:

1. Click the desired album in the Source list to select it.

2. Click the Keepsakes toolbar button and click Book from the pop-up menu.

Depending on your screen resolution, iPhoto may have room to display the Book button by itself — no big deal, because things work the same.

3. Select the size of the book and a theme.

Your choices determine the number of pages and layout scheme, as well as the background graphics for each page.

4. Click Choose.

You’ll see the controls shown in Figure 3-8.

In Book mode, the Viewer changes in subtle ways. It displays the current page at the bottom of the display and adds a scrolling row of thumbnail images above it. This row of images represents the remaining images from the selected album that you can add to your book. You can drag any image thumbnail into one of the photo placeholders to add it to the page. You can also click the Page button at the left of the thumbnail strip — it looks like a page with a turned-down corner — to display thumbnails of each page in your book. (To return to the album image strip, click the Photos button under the Page button.)

5. Rearrange the page order to suit you by dragging the thumbnail of any page from one location to another in the strip.

6. In the Book toolbar below the page view, you can adjust a variety of settings for the final book, including the book’s theme, background, page numbers, and text fonts.

At this point, you can also add captions and short descriptions to the pages of your photo album. Click any one of the text boxes in the page display and begin typing to add text to that page.

7. When you’re ready to publish your book, click the Buy Book button.

8. In a series of dialogs that appears, iPhoto guides you through the final steps to order a bound book.

Note that you’re asked for credit card information, so have that plastic ready.

I wouldn’t attempt to order a book through a dial-up modem connection. The images are likely far too large to be sent successfully. If possible, use a broadband or network connection to the Internet while you’re ordering. If your only connection to the Internet is through a dial-up modem, I recommend saving your book in PDF format and having it printed at a copy shop or printing service instead. (Choose File⇒Print and then click the Save as PDF button.)

You’ll Love MobileMe Gallery!

iPhoto ’09 includes a feature called MobileMe Gallery that does for images what podcasting does for audio: You can share your photos with friends, family, business clients, and anyone else with an Internet connection! (Your adoring public doesn’t even require a Mac; it can use That Other Kind of Computer.) iPhoto automatically uploads the selected images and leads you through the process of creating a new Web page to proudly display your photos. However, you must be a MobileMe subscriber to use the MobileMe Gallery feature. If you haven’t heard the news on Apple’s MobileMe service yet, see Chapter 4 of Book V for the details.

To create a MobileMe Gallery, you designate one or more photos in the Viewer (or even select entire albums or Events in the Source list) and then click the Add button. Click the MobileMe toolbar button in the sheet that appears to display the Web Gallery settings.

Type a name for your new Web Gallery. You can elect to show the title of each photo, allow your visitors to download your images or upload their own, and even allow photos to be uploaded by other computer owners using an e-mail or a Web browser!

By default, any visitor to your MobileMe Web site can see your gallery. But what if you prefer a little security for those images? In that case, click the Album Viewable By pop-up menu, where you can limit your viewing audience (you can even require that your visitors enter a login name and password before they can receive your photos).

Click Publish, and you’ll see that iPhoto indicates that your images are being uploaded with a cool twirling progress icon to the right of the album in the Source list. When the process is complete, iPhoto indicates that the photos appear in a MobileMe Gallery with a new heading in the Source list. You’re on the air!

Now for the other side of the coin: By selecting your MobileMe Gallery in the Source list and clicking Tell a Friend in the iPhoto toolbar, iPhoto automatically prepares an e-mail message in Apple Mail that announces your new Gallery! Just add the recipient names and click Send. This spiffy message includes instructions for

♦ Folks using iPhoto ’09 on a Mac: As you can imagine, this is the easiest receive option to configure. After these folks are subscribed, they get an automatically updated album of the same name that appears in their Source list, and they can use those images in their own iPhoto projects! From within iPhoto, your visitors can subscribe to your MobileMe Gallery by clicking File⇒Subscribe to Photo Feed and entering the subscription URL.

♦ Folks using Windows or an older version of iPhoto: These subscribers can use any Web browser with RSS support (such as the Safari browser that comes with Snow Leopard and is available from Apple for Windows XP or Vista) or any RSS reader. (In effect, your MobileMe Gallery becomes an RSS feed for those without iPhoto ’09.)

By default, any changes you make to the contents of your MobileMe Gallery are updated automatically on your MobileMe account, and, in turn, are updated automatically to everyone who receives your images. You can turn this feature off, however, if you have a large number of images and you update often (which can result in your sister’s computer downloading a lot of data). To display the Check for New Photos setting for MobileMe Gallery, click iPhoto⇒Preferences and click the Web button on the Preferences window toolbar. (You can also change the title for your Gallery and monitor your iDisk usage from this pane.)

Mailing Photos to Aunt Mildred

iPhoto can help you send your images through e-mail by automating the process. The application can prepare your image and embed it automatically in a new message.

To send an image through e-mail, select it and then click the Email button in the toolbar. The dialog, as shown in Figure 3-9, appears, allowing you to choose the size of the images and whether you want to include their titles, descriptions, and Places location information as well.

Keep in mind that most ISP (Internet service provider) e-mail servers don’t accept an e-mail message that’s more than 3MB or 4MB, so watch that Size display. If you’re trying to send a number of images and the size goes over 2MB, you might have to click the Size pop-up menu and choose a smaller size (reducing the image resolution) to get them all embedded in a single message.

When you’re satisfied with the total file size and you’re ready to create your message, click the Compose button. iPhoto automatically launches Apple Mail (or whatever e-mail application you specify) and creates a new message containing the images, ready for you to click Send!