iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

Exporting and Converting Pictures

The whole point of iPhoto is to provide a centralized location for every photo in your world. That doesn’t mean that they’re locked there, however; it’s as easy to take pictures out of iPhoto as it is to put them in. Spinning out a photo from iPhoto can be useful in situations like these:

• You’re creating a Web page outside of iPhoto and you need a photo in a certain size and format.

• You shot a bunch of 6-megapixel photos, you’re running out of disk space, and you wish they were all 4-megapixel shots instead. They’d still have plenty of resolution, but not so much wasted space.

• You’re going to submit some photos to a newspaper or magazine, and the publication requires TIFF-format photos, not iPhoto’s standard JPEG format.

• Somebody else on your network loves one of your pictures and would like to use it as a desktop background on that machine.

• You want to set free a few of the photos so that you can copy them back onto the camera’s memory card. (Some people use their digicams as much for showing pictures to their friends as for taking them.)

• You want to send a batch of pictures on a CD to someone.

Exporting by Dragging

It’s amazingly easy to export photos from iPhoto: Just drag their thumbnails out of the photo viewing area and onto the desktop (or onto a folder, or into a window on the desktop), as shown in Figure 13-3. After a moment, you’ll see their icons appear.

The drag-and-drop method has enormous virtue in its simplicity and speed. It does not, however, ...