Introduction | iPhoto 6: The Missing Manual

In case you haven't heard , the digital camera market is exploding. By early 2006, a staggering 92 percent of cameras sold were digital cameras. It's taken a few decadesthe underlying technology used in most digital cameras was invented in 1969but film is decidedly on the decline.

And why not? The appeal of digital photography is huge. When you shoot digitally, you never have to pay a cent for film or photo processing. You get instant results, viewing your photos just moments after shooting them, making even Polaroids seem painfully slow by comparison. As a digital photographer, you can even be your own darkroom technicianwithout the darkroom. You can retouch and enhance photos, make enlargements, and print out greeting cards using your home computer. Sharing your pictures with others is far easier, too, since you can burn them to CD, email them to friends , or post them on the Web. As one fan puts it: "There are no ' negatives ' in digital photography."

But there is one problem. When most people try to do all this cool stuff, they find themselves drowning in a sea of technical details: JPEG compression, EXIF tags, file format compatibility, image resolutions , FTP clients , and so on. It isn't pretty.

The cold reality is that while digital photography is full of promise, it's also been full of headaches . During the early years of digital cameras, just making the camera-to-computer connection was a nightmare. You had to mess with serial or USB cables; install device drivers; and use proprietary software to transfer, open , and convert camera images into a standard file format. If you handled all these tasks perfectlyand sacrificed a young male goat during the spring equinoxyou ended up with good digital pictures.

iPhoto Arrives

Apple recognized this mess and finally decided to do something about it. When Steve Jobs gave his keynote address at Macworld Expo in January 2002, he referred to the "chain of pain" ordinary people experienced when attempting to download, store, edit, and share their digital photos.

He also focused on another growing problem among digital camera users: Once you start shooting free, filmless photos, they 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 was iPhoto, a simple and uncluttered program designed to organize, edit, and distribute digital photos without the nightmarish hassles. iPhoto 2 through iPhoto 6 carried on the tradition with added features and better speed. (There was no iPhoto 3, however. Keep that in mind if someone tries to sell you a copy on eBay.)

To be sure, iPhoto isn't the most powerful image management software in the world. Like Apple's other iProducts (iMovie, iTunes, iDVD, and so on), its design subscribes to its own little 80/20 rule: 80 percent of us really don't need more than about 20 percent of the features you'd find in a full-blown, $500 digitalasset management program like, say, Apple's own Aperture.

Today, millions of Mac fans use iPhoto. Evidently, there were a lot of digital camera buffs out there, feeling the pain and hoping that iPhoto would provide some muchneeded relief.

What's New in iPhoto 6

iPhoto 6 doesn't represent a big overhaul ; Apple gave it more nips and tucks than massive surgery. Still, there's quite a bit of juicy stuff in the new version:

Speed, glorious speed . This one's the biggie: iPhoto is dramatically faster than previous versions. Faster opening, faster quitting, faster scrolling. It's fast enough, in fact, that it can manage 250,000 photo at a timeas Apple puts it, enough to handle 1,000 pictures a month for 20 years. All the traditional workarounds and speed tips described in Chapter 14 are far less important now, because a single iPhoto library will keep you coasting for several years.
External folder management . iPhoto can manage your photos even if it doesn't add them to its own library, thus erasing a long-standing grievance of people whose photos were already beautifully organized on the hard drive. The program is perfectly capable of tracking pictures that are outside of its own library.
Calendars, cards, and better books . In addition to the usual professionally published books of your photos and Kodak prints, you can now order custom calendars, postcards, and greeting cards (Chapter 10). And if you do decide to order a book, you'll discover that the printing quality has been upgraded substantially.
Full-screen editing . You can now edit photos in a full-screen, edge-to-edge mode that doesn't eat up space with menus , windows and so on. Movable editing palettes float above the image for your convenience.
Photocasting . Talk about instant gratification! Talk about technophobic grandparents! Now you can "publish" an album full of photos, and your fans or relatives can "subscribe" to it. Whenever you make changes to that albumby adding more pix, for exampleyour grateful subscribers see the changes reflected automatically.
One-click effects . A new editing palette turns a photo into a sepia-toned , monochrome, desaturated, or saturation-enhanced version.
Miscellaneous goodies . The rest of iPhoto's cornucopia of newness is just garnish. You can trigger a slideshow of the photos you've put into a book layout; in the library, a superimposed label identifies the date or names of the "film rolls" you're scrolling through so you know when to stop; Smart Albums let you search on more kinds of photo data (like shutter speed and aperture size ); the program is compatible with the RAW files (Section 4.2.6) from more camera models, and handles them better; you can embed ColorSync profiles into your pictures; and so on. Oh, and the iPhoto window has been given a 2006 non-brushed-metal makeover.

Apple did very little rejiggering of iPhoto's tool icons, menu commands, and photo techniques. If anything, these elements have grown easier to understand. All of the "stuff you can do with your photos" icons (Slideshow, Email, Order Prints, and so on) now appear at the bottom of the window; you don't have to add them manually, as in iPhoto 5.

About This Book

Don't let the rumors fool you. iPhoto may be simple, but it isn't simplistic. It offers a wide range of tools, shortcuts, and database-like features; a complete arsenal of photo-presentation features; and sophisticated multimedia and Internet hooks. Unfortunately, many of the best techniques aren't covered in the only "manual" you get with iPhotoits slow, sparse electronic help screens.

This book was born to address two needs. First, it's designed to serve as the iPhoto manualthe book that should have been in the box. It explores each iPhoto feature in depth, offers shortcuts and workarounds, and unearths features that the online help doesn't even mention.

Second, this book provides an invaluable grounding in professional photography. Used together, any good digital camera and iPhoto have all the technical tools you need to produce photographic presentations of stunning visual quality. What's missing are the artistic factors involved in shootingcomposition, lighting, and manual exposureand how to apply them using the myriad features packed into the modern digital camera. This book gives you all you need to know.

And to make it all go down easier, this book has been printed in full color . Kind of makes sense for a book about photography, doesn't it?

About the Outline

This book is divided into four parts , each containing several chapters:

Part 1, Digital Cameras: The Missing Manual , is the course in photography and digital cameras promised above. These three chapters cover buying, using, and exploiting your digital camera; choosing the proper image resolution settings; and getting the most out of batteries and memory cards. This section of the book creates a bridge between everyday snapshots and the kinds of emotionally powerful shots you see in magazines and newspapers.
Part 2, iPhoto Basics , covers the fundamentals of getting your photos into iPhoto, organizing and filing them, searching them, and editing them to compensate for weak lighting (or weak photography).
Part 3, Meet Your Public , is all about the payoff, the moment you've presumably been waiting for ever since you snapped the shotsshowing them off. It covers the many ways iPhoto can present those photos to other people: as a slideshow, as prints you order from the Internet or make yourself, as a professionally published gift book, on a Web page, by email, or as a QuickTime-movie slideshow that you post on the Web or distribute on CD or even DVD. It also covers sharing your iPhoto collection across an office network with other Macs, with other account holders on the same Mac, and with other iPhoto fans across the Internet.
Part 4, iPhoto Stunts , takes you way beyond the basics. It covers a miscellaneous potpourri of additional iPhoto features, including turning photos into screen savers or desktop pictures on your Mac, exporting the photos in various formats, using iPhoto plug-ins and accessory programs, managing (or even switching) Photo Libraries, backing up your photos using iPhoto's Burn to CD command, and even getting photos to and from cameraphones and Palm organizers.

At the end of the book, Appendix A offers troubleshooting guidance, Appendix B goes through iPhoto's menus one by one to make sure that every last feature has been covered, and Appendix C lists some Web sites that will help fuel your growing addiction to digital photography.

About These Arrows

Throughout this book, and throughout the Missing Manual series, you'll find sentences like this one: "Open the System folder Libraries Fonts folder." Thats shorthand for a much longer instruction that directs you to open three nested folders in sequence. That instruction might read: "On your hard drive, you'll find a folder called System. Open it. Inside the System folder window is a folder called Libraries. Open that. Inside that folder is yet another one called Fonts. Double-click to open it, too."

Similarly, this kind of arrow shorthand helps to simplify the business of choosing commands in menus, as shown in Figure I-1.

About MissingManuals.com

At www.missingmanuals.com, you'll find news, articles, and updates to the books in this series.

But if you click the name of this book and then the Errata link, you'll find a unique resource: a list of corrections and updates that have been made in successive printings of this book. You can mark important corrections right into your own copy of the book, if you like.

In fact, the same page offers an invitation for you to submit such corrections and updates yourself. In an effort to keep the book as up-to-date and accurate as possible, each time we print more copies of this book, we'll make any confirmed corrections you've suggested. Thanks in advance for reporting any glitches you find!

In the meantime, we'd love to hear your suggestions for new books in the Missing Manual line. There's a place for that on the Web site, too, as well as a place to sign up for free email notification of new titles in the series.

Figure I-1. In this book, arrow notations help to simplify folder and menu instructions. For example, "Choose Dock Position on Left is a more compact way of saying, "From the menu, choose Dock; from the submenu that then appears, choose Position on Left."

The Very Basics

You'll find very little jargon or nerd terminology in this book. You will, however, encounter a few terms and concepts that you'll see frequently in your Macintosh life. They include:

Clicking . This book offers three kinds of instructions that require you to use the mouse or trackpad attached to your Mac. To click means to point the arrow cursor at something onscreen and thenwithout moving the cursor at allpress and release the clicker button on the mouse (or laptop trackpad). To double-click , of course, means to click twice in rapid succession, again without moving the cursor at all. And to drag means to move the cursor while keeping the button continuously pressed.

When you're told to - click something, you click while pressing the key ( next to the Space bar). Such related procedures as Shift-clicking, Option-clicking , and Control-clicking work the same wayjust click while pressing the corresponding key on the bottom row of your keyboard. (On non-U.S. Mac keyboards, the Option key may be labeled Alt instead.)

Note: On Windows PCs, the mouse has two buttons . The left one is for clicking normally; the right one produces a tiny shortcut menu of useful commands (see the note below). But new Macs come with Apple's Mighty Mouse, a mouse that looks like it has only one button but can actually detect which side of its rounded front you're pressing. If you've turned on the feature in System Preferences, you, too, can right-click things on the screen.That's why, all through this book, you'll see the phrase, "Control-click the photo (or right-click it)." That's telling you that Control-clicking will do the jobbut if you've got a two-button mouse or you've turned on the two-button feature of the Mighty Mouse, right-clicking might be more efficient.
Menus . The menus are the words in the lightly striped bar at the top of your screen. You can either click one of these words to open a pull-down menu of commands (and then click again on a command), or click and hold the button as you drag down the menu to the desired command (and release the button to activate the command). Either method works fine.

Note: Apple has officially changed what it calls the little menu that pops up when you Control-click (or right-click) something on the screen. It's still a contextual menu, in that the menu choices depend on the context of what you clickbut it's now called a shortcut menu. That term not only matches what it's called in Windows, but it's slightly more descriptive about its function. Shortcut menu is the term you'll find in this book.
Keyboard shortcuts . Every time you take your hand off the keyboard to move the mouse, you lose time and potentially disrupt your creative flow. That's why many experienced Mac fans use keystroke combinations instead of menu commands wherever possible. -P opens the Print dialog box, for example, and -M minimizes the current window to the Dock.

When you see a shortcut like -Q (which closes the current program), it's telling you to hold down the key, and, while it's down, type the letter Q, and then release both keys.

If you've mastered this much information, you have all the technical background you need to enjoy iPhoto 6: The Missing Manual .