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iPhoto 2: The Missing Manual
One of the things I like about Apple's iApps is that they hide a great deal of complexity behind a simple interface; they do indeed make the complex simple. The drawback to this is that I often find myself ignoring the more powerful aspects of the application and never using it to its full. It was here that the Missing Manual came to my help.
The target audience for this book would probably be a little less technical than myself or the average Slashdot reader, however when I find myself in a field I don't understand well I don't mind a little stuff for the absolute newbie. This book has an entire first section that deals with photography and digital photography in particular that may be a total repeat for some, I found it a welcome reminder of how to get a good photograph along with some extremely useful hints about the new technology and choosing a camera. It covers such topics as composition and lighting for a host of different situations such as landscapes, night, portraits, children and sports.
It then goes on to a section of similar size on the basics that covers getting the photos from your camera to the Mac, organising the photos using albums and keywords and then editing your shots.
A third section covers the various ways of publishing and showing your photos such as printing, CD, and web pages, and a final section with some tricks and tips on things like managing your libraries. There are two appendices: one very useful troubleshooting guide, and a menu-by-menu look at iPhoto 2.
I particularly appreciated the thorough treatment of how to get the most out of iPhoto when printing photo books and creating web pages in the third section; it was here that I really discovered how little I knew from just 'playing' with the application. The book is peppered with useful information and tips that take you beyond the level that most of us discovered when we ran and used the program. The authors have also provided some marvelous explanations of what is going on, the "why" as well as the "what."
The book is well written with a readable, light, almost witty style that somehow deceives the reader as to the depth of the material being covered. It is only when I reflected back on how much the book taught me that I realised how well it had done the job.
O'Reilly have their usual web page for the book with a sample chapter, Table of Contents and Index. Pogue Press have a neat idea - they have a page that features all the software mentioned in the book. A neat idea that I liked a lot.
In conclusion, I would recommend this book to everyone who is serious about digital photography on their Mac. If you have used iPhoto for a long time you may think the book a waste, but I'd be surprised if even long-time users didn't get their money's worth out of this book. I much preferred the style of this volume to IDG's iPhoto 2 for Dummies , the only other real competitor for this volume was iPhoto 2 for Mac OS X: A Visual Quickstart Guide , and that is a shorter volume with less depth and less advice for photography and nothing on the camera technology, though I think Engst's writing seems a bit clearer at times.
I wouldn't buy a "Missing Manual" for every iApp or the operating system, but if you take the slogan for the series seriously, "The book that should have been in the box" (for the box is entirely devoid of books), I think they are a marvelous help for becoming a true 'power user.'You can purchase iPhoto2: The Missing Manual from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Amazon has it for $2.50 cheaper!(10% cheaper than bn!)
I read iPhoto2 Fast & Easy and thought it was a pretty good reference. Basic but worthwhile.
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All you need to become a power user for an iApp is a bit of spare time, experimentation, and perhaps the help of Mac OS X Hints. You really shouldn't need a book, especially for a program as simple as iPhoto.
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And Bookpool has it $1.97 cheaper than Amazon.
You'd think that the geeks would be using bookpool as opposed to Amazon.
That's funny, when I imported my massive collection of photos, each roll was automatically named with the parent folder's name, and organized automatically.
Sure, they weren't hierarchically organized, but whatever.
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What you didn't mention, I notice, is any tool to organize your images. Presumably you organize them yourself, which is great, but the charm of iPhoto is that it keeps them organized by date (and by virtual "film roll") for you. Manipulation is built in, and it always keeps the original, which GraphicConverter (the only app you mentioned which isn't free, btw) doesn't automatically do. Plus it will automatically export images into files, webpages or QuickTime movies, which saves you a lot of trouble configuring batch edits in GC.
If that's more than you need, then great, although you're not missing anything by replacing a free application with shareware.
This one is a great addition to the book shelf, you all know how to do certain things in IPhoto but this book clarifies nicely why you are actually doing it. Also, it introduces nice advanced features and concepts which amatures might not have come across before.
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I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned this yet, but I had to abandon iPhoto in favor of iView Media.
I imported my 3500+ digital pics I've taken over the years into iPhoto only to find that the application slows down to the point of unusability. Every few operations I attempted to perform would hang for a minute or more -- including simple things like seeing context menus. I did a usenet search and discovered that others had experienced a similar slowdown with large collections in iPhoto.
Well maybe not nesting, but this is the next best thing...
a great piece of freeware called iPhotoBuddy allows you to create and select multiple photo libraries. I don't even have iPhoto in my dock any more because of this software. I keep 4 different libraries and about 3000ish photos (i have a digital camera and a puppy, bite me).
You simply choose which library you want to run - and it launches iPhoto with the corresponding library. My previously insanely slow library is now quick and easy, and iPhoto is a wonderful tool to use again, like when it first came out and I only had 500 pictures.
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I think it's unfair to label the missing manuals as "dummies" books. My sister recently got a 17in. iMac and I quickly grew tired of explaining more advanced things to her. I sent her to BN to pick up a missing manual. Chock full of actually useful information. Everyday I learn something about the Mac I had no idea about and I've been using computers for over 10 years. There's a lot of stuff in those nifty white enclosures.
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I just browsed through the sample chapter and its full of usefull hints such as editing the book templates with Apple's developer tools. This is a great book for for people who are new to Macs or aren't tech-heads.
OTOH, any Mac geek can find all of this info easily at MacOSXHints.com
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As opposed to a single directory full of P07310003.jpg files, as would be the case for the 80% of users who don't know how to automatically script downloading and renaming of the photos from the camera? Personally, while I wouldn't want to navigate the directory structure manually very often, the naming conventions are clear and for the target audience mostly transparent anyway.
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IDG no longer publishes Dummies books. They sold the division to Wiley a few years ago.
FYI.
One big problem that Apple hasn't responded to is sharing a photo library among multiple users. In the current setup, each user of the system has their own home dir, and therefore separate photo libraries, inaccessible by the other users. While iPhoto currently supports a central repository for photos (roughly), it doesn't like it if you try to store it on a network server. Right now I have an old mac running OSX with my iPhoto Library stored on a separate drive. All my other macs are connected to it via 10/100 Ethernet and we mount that drive remotely to access the photos via iPhoto. Let me tell ya, it's DOG SLOW. even with 100Base-T bandwidth, iPhoto only uses a trickle of that potential. Instead of chewing up about 1MB/sec, it accesses the library at about 35kB/sec, so loading albums is a major test of patience.
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.