iPhoto '09: The Missing Manual

Chapter 10. iPhoto Goes to the Movies

As Chapter 6 makes clear, once you select your images and choose the music to go with them, iPhoto orchestrates the production and presents it live on your Mac’s screen as a slideshow.

Which is great, as long as everyone in your social circle lives within six feet of your screen.

The day will come when you want friends and family who live a little farther away to be able to see your slideshows. That’s the beauty of QuickTime, a portable multimedia container built into every Mac. Even if the recipient uses a Windows PC—hey, every family has its black sheep—your photos will meet their public; QuickTime movies play just as well on HPs and Dells as they do on iMacs and MacBooks.

iPhoto ’09 makes it even easier than before to convert those photos into mini-movies. A new Slideshow Export option lets you save your slideshows to QuickTime movie files that play flawlessly on the iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, and other video-watching gadgets. If you want something smaller and simpler, you can also export your photos to a standalone QuickTime movie. In either case, you’ll then have a file on your hard drive that you can email to other people (including Windows people), post on your Web page for downloading, burn onto a CD, and so on.

Before You Export the Slideshow

You have two ways to convert your masterpiece to a video file: Slideshow Export and QuickTime Export, both described in this chapter. But no matter which method you choose, before you send your “slideshow ...