Mac OS X Power Hound, Second Edition

Books

iPhoto lets you create books from your albums. While an album is simply a digital collection of pictures, iPhoto books are, well, actual, physical, gorgeous, hardbound books. You have the luxury of designing your own cover and laying out the individual pages from among the host of design schemes iPhoto offers you. A couple of clicks later, iPhoto hands your book design over to a professional bindery, which delivers the finished product in about three days.

To lay out a book, you need only click the aptly named Book button at the bottom of the iPhoto window.

Exporting Book Pages as Image Files

If one of your book pages is a particularly arresting masterpiece, you may want to print out only that page to hang on your fridge. This tip explains how to separate the page.

Normally, in iPhoto’s Book mode, clicking the Preview button displays a preview within iPhoto itself. However, if you Option-click the Preview button, the book opens in the Preview program (the basic Mac OS X graphics viewer).

In Preview, select the single page you want, and then choose File → Export. In the dialog box that opens, choose a file format—such as JPEG—and press Enter.

A warning appears, blathering on about exporting to a format that does not support multiple pages. In small print it says, “Only the current page will be exported,” which is exactly what you want. When you click OK, you have a spanking new image of your page as it appears in the book, ready to print or email to all your friends.

Printing ...