iPhoto '11: The Missing Manual

Chapter 6. The iPhoto Slideshow

iPhoto’s slideshow feature offers one of the world’s best ways to show off your digital photos (and videos, for that matter). Slideshows are easy to set up, they’re free, and they make your photos look fantastic. And in iPhoto ’11, they’ve been given a dose of steroids. You’ll find six new themes that build on the flying, animated visual styles that debuted in iPhoto ’09, and they even come with their own soundtracks so the animations and music match. All themes also take advantage of iPhoto’s face-recognition smarts—they try to center your subjects’ faces on the screen during the slideshow.

This chapter details not only how to put together an iPhoto slideshow, but also how to create presentations that make you and your photos look their absolute best.

About Slideshows

When you run an iPhoto slideshow, your Mac presents the pictures in Full Screen view—no windows, no menus, no borders—with your images filling every inch of your monitor. Professional transitions take you from one picture to the next, producing a smooth, cinematic effect. If you want, you can change or turn off the music that accompanies the presentation (each theme comes with its own soundtrack). The total effect is incredibly polished, yet creating a slideshow requires very little setup.

Note

If you’re lucky enough to have more than one monitor—or you’ve got a laptop plugged into an external monitor or a TV—the slideshow plays on the monitor containing the iPhoto window. The other monitor ...