iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

Exporting an Instant Slideshow

Before you send your “slideshow movie” to hapless relatives who will have to endure downloading it over a dial-up connection, make sure it’s worth watching in the first place.

Step 1: Perfect the Slideshow

As you review your presentation, place the pictures into the proper sequence, remembering that you won’t be there to verbally “set up” the slideshow and comment as it plays. Ask yourself, “If I knew nothing about this subject, would this show make sense to me?”

During this exercise, you might decide that your presentation could use a few more descriptive images to better tell the story. If that’s the case, go back through your master photo library and look for pictures of easily recognizable landmarks and signs. Put one or two at the beginning of the show to set the stage. For example, if your slideshow is about a vacation in Washington, D.C., then you might want to open with a picture of the Capitol, White House, or Lincoln Memorial.

Tip

If you don’t have any suitable opening shots in your library, or even if you do, another option is to begin your show with a few words of text, like opening credits. To do so, create a JPEG graphic containing the text in a program like AppleWorks, Photoshop, or GraphicConverter. (Make sure this graphic matches the pixel dimensions of your slideshow, as described in the following section.) Then drag the file right into your slideshow album, placing it first in the sequence. You’ve got yourself an opening title screen. ...