How to Make a Beautiful Photo Book on a Mac

You have a TON of digital photographs on your computer. You’d like to share them with family and friends. Making a photo book is a nice, easy way to enjoy your pictures with others using iPhoto and a Mac computer. The photo books are professionally printed and make great one-of-a-kind gifts for those people in your life who have everything. Teachers love photo books, brides love photo books, grandparents love photo books. Everyone loves photo books! It’s easy and fun to do and captures wonderful memories in pictures.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• An Apple Mac Computer
• iPhoto (comes with the iLife suites of applications)
• Fast Internet Connection
• Digital photos
• Creative Ideas

1. Open the application iPhoto. Select a group of photos you want in your photo book and put them in an album. Ideas might include: “Amy’s Baby Shower” or “Jason’s Little League Season” or “Our Disneyland Vacation”. Select the album.

2. At the bottom toolbar in iPhoto, click on the Book icon. The choices of Book Type will appear: Hard Cover (Large 11” x 8 1/2”), Soft Cover (Large, Medium 8” x 6”, Small 3 1/2” x 2 5/8”), Wire-bound Soft Cover (Large, Medium). Along the left side, you can choose from the many different template styles: picture book, travel, simple border, snapshots, to name a few. If you click on options and prices, it will take you to the Apple web site with examples of the designs you are offered. There are a total of thirteen Apple-designed book themes.

3. 
    
   A work in progress

   Once you select “Choose”, a small screen will ask you to either pick Auto-Flow, or to just Drag and Drop from the iPhoto upper window of photos available.

4. Fill in book’s title, captions as needed and proof read the entire book. The forward and back buttons allow you do to this easily.

5. When ready, click on Buy Book. iPhoto will connect with Apple and you can select cover color, quantity, shipping info and fill in credit card information as well.

6. Wait patiently for the book to arrive on your door step 7-10 days later. The Apple packaging is very nice. The books very well protected so they don’t get damaged in delivery! Enjoy!

Tips & Warnings

• Put your album of photos in the sequence you want them to appear in your photo book. It will save you some time when building the pages.
• Have "One-Click" enabled to save time ordering.
• If you change templates after you’ve begun, you might lose some of your work.
• If your digital photographs aren't large enough files, you will get a warning triangle that they might not print properly or clear enough.

Resources

• Apple
• Anne Z on the Web

[vintage]

on 9/18/2009 great tips and article

[tamby2112]

on 8/24/2009 I love this! I love my Mac. Still trying to get to using all of the fun stuff on it! Thanks for the great info! 5*s

[dorigillman]

on 8/18/2009 too bad i don't have a mac, but the article is very well done

[AnneZ]

on 8/17/2009 Check out my new Blog: Anne Z's You Can Do It
http://annez-youcandoit.blogspot.com/