The Macintosh iLife 06

With iWeb photo pages, you can create online photo albums with a few mouse clicks. The album pages contain rows of small thumbnail images that your visitors can click to see larger versions. They can also view a slide show.

Thanks to the way the iLife programs work together, you can start your foray into photo albums in either iPhoto or iWeb. In iPhoto, stash some photos in an album and then sequence them in the order you want them to appear. Then use the Share menu or iWeb button to send the photos to iWeb.

Prefer to start in iWeb? Create a new page and choose a Photos page style. Then drag photos into the placeholder area, or better yet, drag an entire roll or album from the media browser.

iWeb places a caption beneath each thumbnail image. And here's another good reason to use iPhoto to assign titles to your photos (page 120): iWeb uses a photo's title as its caption.

A photo page in iWeb can contain up to 99 photos. You can customize numerous aspects of a photo page: whether to display two or three columns of thumbnail images; how much room to leave for text captions; the kind of frame you want to appear around each thumbnail; and more. And you can apply all the other design techniques described earlier in this chapter: add text, change backgrounds, and tweak formatting.

Creating a Photo Page within iPhoto

Step 1.

Stash the photos you want to publish in an album. If you're lazy, you can also simply select a series of photos in your library.

Step 2.

Choose Share > Send to iWeb > Photo Page or, from the iWeb button at the bottom of the iPhoto window, choose Photo Page.

Step 3.

In iWeb, choose a template, then click Choose or press Return.

Creating a Photo Page within iWeb

Step 1.

Choose File > New Page or click the button in the lower-left corner of the iWeb window.

Step 2.

Choose a template, then select its Photos page style, and then click Choose or press Return.

Step 3.

Drag photos into the thumbnails placeholder area. Here, I'm using the media browser to add an entire iPhoto album.

Notes and Tips

Mix and match. You can mix and match approaches: create a photo page using iPhoto, then switch to iWeb to add additional photos to the existing page. You can't take the opposite route, howeverwhen you send photos from iPhoto to iWeb, the photos are always added to a new photo page.

Rearrange and refine. To change the order of the photos in a photo page, simply drag the photos. To remove a photo, select it and press the Delete key. To change a photo's caption, click it and start typing.

Learn how to customize iWeb slide shows. www.macilife.com/iweb

Photo Page Tips and Techniques

Customizing the Photo Grid

To customize the grid of thumbnail photos that iWeb displays, select any thumbnail in the grid and then display the Graphic Inspector.

Moving the Grid

You can move the photo thumbnail grid by dragging it elsewhere on the webpage canvas. You can also resize the grid, although not by dragging its selection handles; instead, use the Metrics Inspector.

Customizing Captions

You can use the Text Inspector and the Fonts panel to customize your thumbnail captions. You might want the captions to be left-aligned, instead of centered, below each thumbnail. Or you might want to use a different font for the captions.

You can change these attributes for individual thumbnail captions, but for the sake of good taste, it's best to use the same formatting for all captions on a page.

To apply formatting changes to every caption, you need to select the thumbnail grid, but without selecting any thumbnails. Click near one of the edges of the grid. If you also end up selecting a thumbnail, click closer to one of the grid's edges.

Publishing a Photocast

If you drag a photocast album into a photo page, iWeb adds its photos as it would with an ordinary album. This works whether you drag a photocast album that you created or one that you've subscribed to.

You can also create a button that will allow your site's visitors to subscribe to the photocast. To do so, drag the photocast album to a spot on the page other than the thumbnail grid. When you release the mouse button, iWeb adds the button.

For the lowdown on photocasts, see pages 168171.

Slide Shows

When a visitor to your site clicks the Start Slideshow button on a photo page, Apple's .Mac service creates a glitzy display: each photo is on a black background with that ubiquitous reflection effect, and a row of thumbnail images appears when you move the mouse toward the top of the window.

Some intrepid iWeb users have figured out ways to customize the slide show display to remove that reflection effect. You'll find links to instructions on my Web site.

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