iPhoto: The Missing Manual

Chapter 10. iPhoto Goes to the Movies

As Chapter 6 makes clear, once you select your images and pair music 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. That’s the beauty of QuickTime, a multimedia program built into every Mac. Even if the recipient uses a Windows PC—hey, every family has its black sheep—she can still see your photos: QuickTime movies play just as well on HPs and Dells as they do on iMacs and MacBooks.

Fortunately, iPhoto makes it easier than ever to convert those photos into mini-movies. The program’s Slideshow Export option lets you save your slideshows as QuickTime movie files that play flawlessly on iPads, iPods, iPhones, Apple TVs, and other video-watching gadgets. Within seconds, you’ll have a file on your hard drive that you can send to other people (including Windows folks) via services like Dropbox; post on your web page; upload to YouTube, Facebook or Flickr; or burn onto a CD or DVD.

This chapter teaches you how to do all those things and more.

Note

If you’re using iPhoto on an iPad and you have an iCloud account (Using iCloud’s Photo Stream), you can create a slideshow and then publish it on your iCloud web page. This method lets you skip the whole “exporting it as a movie” process. Flip ahead ...