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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.
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Apple is for babies who don't deserve a real computer.
Amazon has it for $2.50 cheaper!(10% cheaper than bn!)
This third post brought to you by my huge uncircumcised member. Share and enjoy.
I read iPhoto2 Fast & Easy and thought it was a pretty good reference. Basic but worthwhile.
KARMA TAG! You're it.
iPhoto isn't all that great. I wish they would have a better thumbnail generator (one that would make nicely formatted html for your web galleries).
Also, some of the filters are dog slow. And by dog, I mean as slow as a booting xp box.
Other than that it's ok, but I haven't really seen the need for a manual for it.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Well, if you can't figure out iPhoto then I am quite surprised that you figured out how use the web browser, never mind submitting something to Slashdot.
Maybe someday you can learn to use a mouse with 2 buttons (or even 3!), when mommy gives you a computer with your own AOL account.
Young Jane only married her husband Peter because he was very wealthy, had a Ph.D. and had a perfect body for a male. She hated and loathed all men and only wanted one that could provide of the highest quality sperm that would give her a daughter with high intelligence, and a strong and beautiful body. On their wedding night when Peter tried to kiss her in the bridal suite of the hotel room, Jane gave him a look of disgust and pushed him away. At first, Peter looked surprised and tried again and Jane pushed away again. Pat looked upset and left her alone for a while and the tried to put his arms round her. Jane just went stiff and pushed him away again.
Peter smiled at Jane patiently and told her he loved her then went into the bathroom, took his clothes off then had a shower. After his shower he walked back into the bedroom and stood in front of Jane and presented his naked body and asked "Do you like what you see darling?" Jane looked him up and down and as she did a look of revulsion and nausea broke across her as she felt sickened and revolted by the sight of his naked male body. Sensing her feelings towards his body, he felt a slight tinge of masochistic pleasure as he saw Jane look at his body with a nauseated look of contempt and disgust. "No, the sight of you naked makes me want to puke my guts up" replied Jane. Peter left even more excited by her response to his question and decided to push the issue further. Taking his cock, he waved it in front of her and asked, "Do you like this?" This made Jane feel as though she was about to be sick, as she snapped at him "NO! I HATE IT! THE SIGHT OF IT DISGUSTS AND SICKENS ME!" This made his cock start to stiffen.
Jane smiled sweetly at him and replied, "Its nothing personal I just don't like men". "Why?" asked Peter with a puzzled look on his face "Do you hate me?" "No I love you I don't like men's bodies." Lied Jane. She could not yet bring herself to tell him that she hated him and all men. "Is there anything you would like to do to me for sexual pleasure?" asked Peter. "Yes, darling." Replied Jane with an innocent baby like smile "I would like to be sadistic and dominant with you." Peter felt a sudden bolt of sexual excitement flood through his body making him feel an overwhelming desire to throw himself at her feet. To her delight that is just what he did as he dropped to her feet and started to lick and kiss her bridal shoe clad feet. "What do you want me to do?" Jane asked him. "I want you to be sadistic to me." Replied Peter. Jane felt her pussy start to tingle and get moist as she looked down at her pathetic new husband readily agree to become her celibate slave. "If you want me to be your sadistic dominatrix you will have to beg me." Purred Jane happily. "Please my darling Jane be sadistic, dominant and cruel with me. Hit me, kick me, beat me and treat me like the shit I am. I want you to hate me, I know you find me revolting I love your hatred of me, I love you because you hate me." As he said this, a female porter knocked on the door and walked in with some complementary Champaign from the hotel manager.
Jane smiled at the porter looked down at Peter kissing his brides shoe-clad feet begging her to beat him. All the female porter could was to look from Peter to Jane and back from Jane to Peter with astonishment that a man like him would grovel at his bride's feet. "Are you impressed?" asked Jane. All the female porter could do was to nod her head slowly and say, "Wow, this is so cool Madam." Jane looked the female porter up and down and felt sexual excited by her short red hair, lovely cold blue eyes, pale freckled skin, small pert breasts under her porters jacket and long firm trouser clad thighs and legs. "What is your name?" asked Jane. "My name madam is Jenny Brown." Replied the female porter. "Don't call me madam just call me Jane." Said Jane. "My husband wants me to kick him. Where do you think I should kick him?" asked Jane. Jenny felt herself becoming highly sexually aroused by what she was seeing and hearing. Her mouth became dr
It's a wonder anyone uses them for anything.
Reading two volumes just to be able to view porn? Bah.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
yes?
I think it would have been nice to have recieved something of this nature when I bought my new macintosh. Something to give me a little peek into the power of the iApps.
;-))
I think that would help Apple out a lot, to have more in-depth PDFs on their iApps, like iMovie, iDVD, and iPhoto
I think that would help more and more normal mac users become power mac users (get it! powermac
Error 407 - No creative sig found
but it simply is more than I need. When I download pictures off my camera, I use EXIF-Renamer to rename the photos based on the date and time they were taken. I use JView to view them and if I want to order hard copies, I use Ofoto via Safari. Should I need to manipulate the images, I have GraphicConverter.
The best thing about this is they there are no installers to run; they are "drag and drop" installed applications. But I can also understand why people like iPhoto.
Your name is Hugh, right?
Anyhnow, iPhoto needs two things badly
- The ability to have hierarchical (nested) libraries
- The ability to use the FS layout of files to create the above hierarchical libraries when importing
I have a massive amounts of images (no, not porn) that I have organized painstakingly using folders and importing them into iPhoto lost all of that organization. Now I have to manually create libraries and I cannot nest them.Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
The claim to third post is wholly seperate and unrelated to the post. Welcome to /.
I want my Microsoft Paint missing manual!
It's long been accepted that Apple users are liberal, leftist fruitcakes with little or no recognition of reality. Well, let me offer a wake up call to you from the conservative Right!
When all those Islamic towel-heads destroy the "great Satan" that is Western culture, the fruits of prosperity will cease and the world will fall into civil decay and revert back to barbarianism. You know what that means? You will no longer have your pretty Macintoshes to play with, so you had better shape up and start using Microsoft!
You see, that colored race which roams the desert looking for ways to destroy us does not realize that we are the only source of progress in philosophy, science, and art. Without America and its good, wholesome Christian values, this world would have nothing. There will be no one left to drive the human race towards perfection. Also, without Microsoft, we will no longer be able to gain progress in computer technology. This goes for you communist open-source losers too: if you destroy Microsoft, that will be one less resource with which we can fight Islam.
Once we've been destroyed by these short-sighted individuals, humanity will slowly fall into its doom. Afterall, the arabic peoples won't stop until everyone else is destroyed, then, like animals (I don't even think they're people), they will destroy themselves. (Again, we have liberal communists and Apple users in our own society trying to destroy America with "free" software.)
How can a violent race like that ever spawn social progress? They're quite literally like monkeys, running around like crazy, flinging feces at each other. Without Truth (the Word of God), they've gone quite insane with the devil whispering in their ears. Unlike monkeys flinging feces at each other, they fling bombs at each other (and us).
Personally, I'm glad that a good Christian man (women really can't be Good, because they cannot be like God as they lack the proper equipment), like George Walker Bush, has the guts to stand up and say "we won't let these inferior people destroy America". Now we're taking steps to exterminate them and take their resources for the advancement of America. Good show, Bush!
And Bookpool has it $1.97 cheaper than Amazon.
You'd think that the geeks would be using bookpool as opposed to Amazon.
is a missing manual to find the second mouse button.
This couldn't be...
I think the "Missing Manual" series should be renamed to the "I've got a cracked version" series.
Redundant as hell. It's almost a cut and paste from the post just above.
What kind of review is this? I want to find out about character development and whether or not there are any glaring plot holes! And you didn't even give away the ending! All you told me was why I might find this book useful.
Oh, wait...
Who the hell reads manuals for software?
I use iPhoto simply because it's free.
Men, do not be fooled by the "sweetness" of your woman. Beneath that pretty exterior, there is a hard, sadistic control-freak just trying to get out and get you.
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.
There is no god
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.
The problem with iPhoto is that it does not have a web interface. And sharing via iMac web services is tedious and limited in storage.
Pixory solves all of these problems. And best of all, of course, it runs on Linux!
www.pixory.org
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg mp3 from one folder on the hard drive to an ipod. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
sed s/women/macintoshes/
Hey, I am a liberal, left-leaning queer and that was plain insulting!
Can you say that the current foreign policy of your adored George Walker Bush has any connection to the reality?! Oh yeah, let's alienate all our friends and abandon our moral high ground when it comes to applying deadly force only when truly necessary.
I think the best photo management tool is Gallery (http://gallery.menalto.com/). It is completely web based, it has an excellent rights system, people can leave comments, and it has precompiled image manipulation libraries for mac. I used to heavily use Iphoto, but it just wasn't good enough.
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
Sound waves should be free!
> The target audience for this book would probably
> be a little less technical than myself or the
> average Slashdot reader
So...ummm...you're saying that you're a little more technical than the average Slashdot reader?
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Slashdot fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Slashdot screen for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 line troll from one message thread on the hard drive to another thread. 20 minutes. At home, on my Kur05hin account, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Slashdot, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this troll transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even fuckedcompany.net is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Slashdots, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Slashdot that has run faster than its Kuro5hin
counterpart, despite the Slashdot's faster troll architecture. my.yahoo.com with 8 categories of Rueters Top News runs faster than this site at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Slashdot is a superior forum.
Slashdot addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Slashdot over other faster, cheaper, more stable forums.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
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.
and I've turned off my firewall, plugged my ibook straight into the cable modem, and have even tried it over my 56k modem.
Wow, I was a whiny left-wing mac user, until I read your post! Thanks for opening my eyes, my Christian brother!
What? Look, this isn't a MacOS bash--I love my macs and use iPhoto all the time. But other than filling up iPhoto with thousands of photos (and that doesn't even count) what is 'serious work' with iPhoto? It's simply not that deep an application.
Go to the iPhoto view menu and select By Roll. ALl the folder names are there now. It would be nice for nesting though.
And support for the little videos that digicams can take.
Etc, etc, ad nauseam, and so on and so forth.