The QuickTime Slideshow

As Chapter 9 makes clear, once you select your images and choose the music to go with them, iPhoto orchestrates the production and presents it live on your Mac’s screen as a slideshow.

Which is great, as long as everyone in your social circle lives within six feet of your screen.

The day will come when you want friends and family who live a little farther away to be able to see your slideshows. Sure, you could pack up your Mac and fly across the country, but wouldn’t it be easier to simply send the slideshow as a file attachment that people can play on their own computers?

That’s the beauty of QuickTime, a portable multimedia container built into every Mac. Even if the recipient uses a Windows PC (every family has its black sheep), your photos will meet their public; QuickTime movies play just as well on HPs and Dells as they do on iMacs and PowerBooks.

The trick is to convert your well-composed iPhoto slideshow into a standalone Quick-Time movie—a file on your hard drive that you can email to other people, post on your Web page for downloading, burn onto a CD, and so on.

Fortunately, iPhoto makes creating the movie as simple as creating the original show itself. You just have to know which buttons to click.

Step 1: Perfect the Slideshow

Before you pack up your slideshow for release to the public, review it to make sure it plays the way you want it to. You’ll probably find it easiest to create a new album just for your QuickTime slideshow (Chapter 7), so that you ...

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