iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

Customizing the Shoebox

iPhoto starts out looking just the way you probably see it now, with each picture displayed as a small thumbnail against a plain white background. This view makes it easy to browse through photos and work with iPhoto’s various tools.

But hey, this is your digital shoebox. With a little tweaking and fine-tuning, you can completely customize the way iPhoto displays your photos.

Start with a visit to iPhoto → Preferences and click the Appearance button.

Tip

You can open the iPhoto Preferences window at any time by pressing ⌘-, (comma). This keystroke is blissfully consistent across all the iLife programs.

Changing the View

The controls in the Appearance panel of the Preferences window let you make some pretty significant changes to the overall look of your Photo Library. See Figure 5-22 for an example.

Here are your options:

• Add or remove a border or shadow. The factory setting, Drop Shadow, puts a soft black shadow behind each thumbnail in the photo-viewing pane, a subtle touch that gives your Photo Library an elegant 3-D look.

  As pretty as this effect is, however, there’s also a decent reason to turn it off: It slows iPhoto down slightly, as the program has to continually redraw or resize those fancy shadows behind each thumbnail whenever you scroll or zoom. Switch to either the Border or No Border setting and you’ll be rewarded with faster scrolling and smoother zooming whenever you change the size of thumbnails (as described in the next section). The Border setting ...