iPhoto 6: The Missing Manual

2017-07-07 02:10:07

10.7. Photo Calendars

Custom-made photo books? Old hat, dude. In iPhoto 6, the big news is the other custom stuff you can order: calendars, greeting cards, and postcards. (Mugs and bumper stickers will have to wait for iPhoto 7.)

The calendars are absolutely beautiful. As shown in Figure 10-15, each is spiral bound, with a big Picture of the Month (or Pictures of the Month) above, the month grid below. You can customize each calendar with text, titles, national holidays, events imported from your own iCal calendar, and even little thumbnail photos on the date squares.

If you've ever designed an iPhoto book, designing an iPhoto calendar will give you an overwhelming sense of d j vu. The calendar-design module is almost identical to the book-design module, except that it's turned 90 degrees. That is, the "not yet placed" photo tray runs vertically down the side, rather than across the top.

Figure 10-15. Top: All of the calendar themes are, well, designs for calendars. The differences among them have to do with font choices, photo placement, and background pattern.
Bottom: As indicated by the "Start calendar on" controls, your calendar doesn't have to start with January, and it can include any number of months up to 24 (two years ).
As for "Import iCal calendars:" You can turn on the checkboxes individually for each calendar (that is, category) that you've set up in iCal: Work, Social, Home, Sports League, Casey Stuff, whatever.

Anyway, here's the drill.

10.7.1. Phase 1: Choose the Photos

Pick out pictures for the cover photo, the "picture of the month" photos, and any pictures you want to drag onto individual date squares. You can select one full album, several albums, or any group of thumbnails in the viewing area.

10.7.2. Phase 2: Choose the Calendar Design

Choose New Calendar, or click the Calendar button on the iPhoto toolbar.

A dialog box appears, filled with miniature calendar designs (Figure 10-15, top). These are the calendar design themes , which are just like the book themes described in Section 10.2. Once again, click a miniature to see what the finished calendar will look like. The designs differ in photo spacing, the font used for the dates, the availability of captions, and so on.

Click the theme you want, and then click Choose Theme. Now the dialog box shown at bottom in Figure 10-14 appear; here's where you can set up your calendar. For example, you can specify what period you want the calendar to cover.

The "Show national holidays" pop-up menu lets you pre-fill your calendar with important holidays. The United States dates include things like Valentine's Day, Lincoln's Birthday, and Thanksgiving; the French dates include Whit Sunday, Assumption Day, and Bastille Day (in English); and the Malaysian holidays are along the lines of Merdeka, Awal Ramadan, and Yang Di-Pertua of Sarawak's Birthday.

WORKAROUND WORKSHOP

Secrets of the Apple Book Publishing Empire

It's no secret that when you order prints of your photos via the Internet, Kodak makes the prints. But neither temptation nor torture will persuade Apple to reveal who makes the gorgeous iPhoto photo books.

It didn't take long for Mac fans on the Internet, however, to discover some astonishing similarities between the iPhoto books and the books created by a firm called MyPublisher. com. The pricing, timing, and books themselves are all identical. (When asked if it's Apple's publishing partner, MyPublisher.com says, "We don't discuss our partner relationships," which means "Yes.")

The truth is, iPhoto-generated books are more elegantly designed than the ones you build yourself at MyPublisher.

And it's certainly easier to upload books directly from iPhoto, rather than to upload photo files one at a time using your Web browser.

Still, you should know that building your books directly at MyPublisher.com offers greater design freedom than iPhoto does. You have a wider choice of cover colors and materials (even leather), you can add a glossy dust jacket, you can add borders around the pages, and you have much more flexibility over the placement of photos and text.

In fact, it's easy to get carried away with these options and produce something absolutely ghastly, which is probably why Apple chose to limit your options. This way, you simply can't go wrong.

But you knew that.

Finally, if you keep your calendar in iCal (the calendar program in your Applications folder), you can choose to have those events appear on your new photo calendar (Figure 10-15, bottom).

As a bonus, you can turn on "Show birthdays from Address Book." That's a reference to the Mac OS X address book program, whichalong with names , addresses, and phone numbershas a space to record each person's birthday. Incorporating them into your printed calendar means that you'll never forget a loved one's (or even liked one's) special day.

Figure 10-16. There are plenty of places to click as you design a calendar or card.
Down the left side of the screen, for example, iPhoto shows the thumbnails of the pictures you've selected for inclusionor the thumbnails of the actual calendar pages, which gives you an at-a-glance overview of your design progress.

Tip: This isn't the only chance you'll have to make these settings. You can return to this Settings dialog box at any timewhen you're moving to Malaysia, for example, and want to change the holiday listingsby clicking the Settings button at the bottom of the calendar-design window.

When you're finished setting things up, click OK; you arrive in the calendar-design module. A new icon appears in the Source list, representing the calendar you're creating; you can file it into a folder, rename it, or trash it just as you would a slideshow or a book. You're ready for the fun part: installing your photos onto the calendar pages.

10.7.3. Phase 3: Design the Pages

Each page "spread" of the calendar shows a month grid on the lower page (below the spiral binding), and a "photo of the month" above (Figure 10-16). On each upper page, you'll find gray placeholder rectangles where you can install your favorite photos.

You put your own pictures into those gray boxes works exactly the way you do when designing photo books. That is, you can let iPhoto fill those gray boxes automatically (by clicking the Autoflow button at the bottom of the window), or you can drag pictures onto them one at a time from the left-side waiting area.

You'll find these gray rectangles in three places:

Figure 10-17. This palette appears when you double-click a photo you've dropped on a date square. You can use the slider to enlarge the picture within its little box; drag inside the picture to reposition it in the frame; or type a caption into the text box at the bottom.
Turn on the Caption checkbox to make it appear, and don't miss the four-way "compass" that determines where the caption appears, relative to the date square: above, below, to the left, or whatever.

The cover . Choose one really good picture to grace the front. This is what the recipient (even if it's you) is going to see when first unwrapping the calendar.

The upper page ("picture of the month" space) . Illustrate each month with an especially appropriate photoor more than one. Use the Layout pop-up menu to choose Two, Three, or whatever; some Themes let you place as many as seven pictures above the spiral binding.

Tip: The Layout pop-up menu has a few other surprises , too. In the Baby themes, for example, it offers an upper-page layout that contains only one tiny photo and a lot of information about the baby's birth (time, date, gender, weight, and so on).

Individual date squares . This is the part that might not have occurred to you: dragging photos onto individual squares of the calendar. Put people's faces on their birthday squares, for example, or vacation shots on the dates when you took them.

Tip: Once you've dropped a picture onto a calendar square, you can double-click it to open the handy editing window shown in Figure 10-17.

When you're finished editing January (or whatever), click one of the big black arrow buttons (lower right) to move on to the next month whose page you want to design.

10.7.4. Phase 4: Edit the Text

Once your calendar is photographically compelling, you can finish it off with titles, captions, and other text.

The cover, for example, offers both a main title and a subtitle . Click the placeholder words to select and replace them with new text of your own.

You can also double-click any date to open up a text box that you can type into (like "Robin's Graduation" or "House Foreclosure"). If the date has a photo on it, you can type into the Caption box. If not, you just get a straight-ahead text box that suffices to label that particular date square.

Tip: Once the caption box is open, you don't have to close it and re-open it for another date. Each time you click a square on the calendar, the caption box automatically changes to show its text contents. (This trick also applies to the photo box shown in Figure 10-17.)

GEM IN THE ROUGH

A Pop-Up You Might Miss

Don't miss the "pop-up icon" called Design (at the bottom of the window). It offers variations on the photo layout for each month's upper page.

In most themes, those variations don't amount to much. The Design pop-up menu usually offers only two choices: one design with a place to type a picture caption, and another without.

But in some themes, like the Paper Animals and Baby designs, the Design pop-up menu offers as many as eight different designsdifferent background patterns for your photos, for example.

Just as with books, you can change the font formattingeither globally (for all pages) or for just some selected text:

To change the font globally, click the Settings button on the iPhoto toolbar. In the resulting dialog box, click the Fonts tab. Use the individual pop-up menus (for Cover Subtitle, Comments, Page Text, and so on) to specify the fonts and sizes you want. (If you decide that Apple's original font assignments were actually better than what you've come up with, click Restore Defaults.)

To change the font for just one word (or sentence , or whatever), highlight it by dragging across it. Choose Edit Font Show Fonts to make the standard Mac OS X Fonts panel appear.

10.7.5. Phase 5: Order the Calendar

When you've said to yourself, "I'm [your name here], and I approve of this calendar," click the Buy Calendar button.

If you've left any gray boxes empty (without putting your photos into them), or if any caption placeholders are still empty, an error message appears. You won't be able to order the calendar without filling the gray boxes, although leaving captions empty is OK. (The calendar will simply print without any text there. Not even the dummy placeholder text will print.)

After a moment, your Mac connects to the Internet, and you see the Order Calendar dialog box. It looks and works identically to the Order Book screen (Figure 10-14), except that the pricing is a little different and you don't choose a color for the cover. (A 12-month calendar costs $20. Each additional month adds another $1.50 to the price.)

Figure 10-18. At first, all 20 Apple card designs appear in the scrolling window; if you want to narrow them down a bit, click a category name at left (like Seasonal or Baby/Kids).
And above all, remember to make a selection from the pop-up menu at top: either Greeting Card or Postcard.

Assuming you're all signed up as a certified Apple customer (Section 10.6), all you have to do is specify how many copies you want, where you want them shipped, and via which method (standard or expressed ). Click Buy Now, and mark off the very few days on your old calendar as you want for the new one to arrive.