iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

Instant Slideshows

An instant slideshow, for the purposes of this book, is one that you begin by clicking the triangular Play button beneath the Source list without the Option key. It makes the Slideshow dialog box appear, so that you can make a few quick changes to the slideshow settings. (Slide selection and slide sequence, as described in the previous paragraphs, work the same way.)

The Slideshow dialog box has two panels—Settings and Music—as shown in Figure 7-2. In iPhoto 5, you have more ways than ever to customize your slideshow:

Transitions

In iPhoto4, you were offered a mere four types of transition effects between slides—for example, the crossfade or dissolve, in which one slide gradually fades away as the next “fades in” to take its place. These days, you have a choice of 13 transition effects:

• None. An abrupt switch, or simple cut, to the following image.

• Cube. Imagine that your photos are pasted to the sides of a box that rotates to reveal the next one. If you’ve ever used the Fast User Switching feature introduced in Mac OS 10.3, you’ve got the idea.

• Dissolve. This classic crossfade should be familiar to users of previous versions of iPhoto or the screen saver feature in Mac OS X.

• Droplet. New in iPhoto 5, this wild effect resembles animated, concentric ripples expanding from the center of a pond—except that a new image forms as the ripples spread.

• Fade Through Black. Here’s another new one…and an incredibly useful one to boot. After each slide has strutted and fretted its ...