iLife '04: The Missing Manual

The Post-Dump Slideshow

Once you’ve imported a batch of pictures into iPhoto, what’s the first thing you want to do? If you’re like most people, this is the first opportunity you have to see, at full size, the masterpieces you and your camera came up with.

In iPhoto 4, a glorious new feature awaits you: a slideshow with the tools you need to perform an initial screen of the new pictures—like deleting the baddies, rotating the sideways ones, and identifying the best ones with star ratings.

To begin the slideshow, click the Last Roll icon in the Source list at the left side of the screen to identify which pictures you want to look over.

Figure 6-6. Here’s iPhoto’s way of telling you that you just tried to feed it a file that it can’t digest: an EPS file, an Adobe Illustrator drawing, QuickTime movie, or PowerPoint file, for example.Of course, you can always open up an EPS or PostScript file in your Preview program, and then export it into a more iPhoto-friendly format from there.

UP TO SPEEDJPEG and TIFF

Most digital cameras capture photos in a graphics-file format called JPEG. That’s the world’s most popular file format for photos, because even though it’s compressed to take up a lot less disk space, the visual quality is still very high.

Some cameras offer you the chance to leave your photos uncompressed on the camera, in what’s called TIFF format. These files are huge—you’ll be lucky if ...