iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

Chapter 7. The iPhoto Slideshow

Photo’s slideshow feature offers one of the world’s best ways to show off your digital photos. Slide shows are easy to set up, they’re free, and they make your photos look fantastic—and in iPhoto 5, the whole slideshow mechanism has been gutted and renovated. This chapter details not only how to put together an iPhoto slideshow, but how to give 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 mode—no windows, no menus, no borders—with your images filling every inch of the monitor. Professional transitions take you from one picture to the next, producing a smooth, cinematic effect. If you want, you can even add a musical soundtrack to accompany the presentation. The total effect is incredibly polished, yet creating a slideshow requires very little setup.

You always begin by selecting the pictures you want—by clicking an album or a Library icon, for example. At this point, you can kick off a slideshow in three different ways, each one offering a different degree of instant gratification and flexibility:

• Option-click. Option-click the triangular Play button under the Info pane (see Figure 7-1). A moment later, your Mac’s screen fades to black, and then the show begins. Each photo is displayed full screen for two seconds, and then softly fades out as the next one dissolves into view. The default musical soundtrack—J. S. Bach’s Minuet in G—plays ...