iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

Phase 4: Design the Pages

When you click Automatically or Manually, two more things happen. First, a new icon appears in your Source list, representing the book layout you’re about to create. You can work with it as you would other kinds of Source-list icons. For example, you can delete it by dragging it to the iPhoto Trash, rename it by double-clicking, file it in a folder by dragging it there, and so on.

Note

If you’re used to previous iPhoto versions, this is a happy bit of news. It means that a book is no longer tied to an album. Therefore, rearranging or reassigning photos to the original album no longer wreaks havoc with the book design that’s associated with it.

Second, you now see something like Figure 10-3. The page you’re working on always appears at nearly full size in the main part of the window. Up above, you see a set of thumbnails, either of your photos or of your book pages (more on this in a moment); that’s the photo browser. iPhoto has just turned into a page-layout program.

Once you’ve selected an album and a theme, the most time-consuming phase begins: designing the individual pages.

Open a Page

That photo browser at the top of the window has two functions, as represented by the two tiny icons at its left edge.

When you click the top one (the blue page button), you see miniatures of the pages in your book. This is your navigation tool, your master scroll bar. When you click one of the page thumbnails, the full-sized (well, fuller-sized) image of that page appears in ...