Playing With iPhoto Books: The Key to Success

Getting Started

The best way to start making your iPhoto book: select your album, create a book, choose a theme you think you might like, and start adding pictures. Remember, you can always change things later. This is the same mentality as essay writing (think waaaay back to college!): just start writing and worry about fixing it later!

You can fool around with the lower menu, changing the number of pictures on each page, selecting the specific layout you want (notice in older versions of iPhoto, it only shows you layouts for the number of photos you've selected, so if you want more layouts, you'll have to change that number), and moving the slider to increase or decrease the size of the viewscreen. The more you start playing with picture books, the more features you'll discover and the easier it'll become to build great books!

Fine Tuning

Once you have the photo book set up more or less the way you like it, it's time to start fine tuning the book. This is the difference between a good book and a great book: playing with iPhoto books until you get exactly the look you're going for!

Here are some tips to help you make those pictures look just right:

- you can change the font size, type, and layout with the "settings" ("styles" in older versions) tool (the gear wheel looking thing in the bottom of the screen). You can set different fonts and styles for the title, captions, or the front and back flaps.

- one of the things not readily obvious until you start playing with iPhoto books: how to recenter your photographs! Actually, it's remarkably easy. Just click on the photo you want to work with. A small slider menu will pop up, which you can use to resize the photo if you want to. Otherwise, you can hold down the mouse and shift the photo up and down, right and left, until it's centered exactly how you want it.

There are other things you'll enjoy doing with your photo books, but it's really up to you how you want to organize them! As long as you play with iPhoto books, you'll produce a great product in the end.