I’ve had iPhoto for years and, time and time again, I’ve been sorely tempted to create an iPhoto book.
In fact, I’ve started to create several – none of which I’ve been ultimately happy with and so never had them published.
They’re so beguiling, aren’t they? I’ve seen them in the Apple store and they look marvelous. You try the “make book†tool in iPhoto and almost instantly, it’s all done for you, isn’t it?
Therein lies the problem. Those books in the Apple store aren’t really done by mere mortals, are they? Those seemingly family photos are taken by professional photographers, using professional models under controlled settings and then the photos are processed and color-corrected on pro equipment, prior to being assembled in iPhoto by some professional designer.
They look great, but do they look like what the unwashed masses would get?
In the past, I’ve tried using the automatic tools to create a book out of a photo album. Initially, it looks great, but then I start to see the problems. This page chose a 6-picture layout, but only 5 pictures are of the same theme. Or, there are six pictures on the same theme but one is on the preceding page.
No problem, right? You can edit what was automatically created. That rapidly becomes more trouble than it is worth. Change this page layout here, move these photos there, add pages, delete pages. The alternating page colors get screwed up. You end up pushing or pulling an increasing number of photos to new pages as each change gets made. By the end, I’m completely dissatisfied with the result.
Finally, last week, I decided that it was now or never and I started a new book project and I was determined to let nothing stop me.
I decided to go with a theme, and took at the photos from this year’s trip to Taiwan and then pick out the ones that I thought were best. “best†being a subjective term. In this case, my idea was to document the events of the trip from a family perspective. (That may sound obvious, but in the past I’ve tended to favor my best photos from a photographic standpoint.)
I made no attempt to limit the number of pictures. The book would be as big as the book needed to be to tell the story.
I manually sorted and grouped them within the album and then I created a book without autoflowing the photos. I looked at each group, and where I was in the book, I chose the page layouts based on the number of photos in the group. I moved them, I tweaked them, I spent hours over the course of several days. Finally it was done.
Then came the worse part: waiting.
Yesterday it arrived.
I can’t show you what it looks like in a blog post, but it is pretty impressive. The pictures are not quite as glossy as I was thinking, which alters their appearance a bit, and my color-correcting wasn’t always right. But overall it’s really impressive.
My biggest complaint is that it’s too small. I ended up with just shy of 200 photos in the book. That’s about the size of one standard photo album, which would measure over an inch thick and over 12“ tall and 6†wide.
The size of the iPhoto book is spectacularly unimpressive, at 8“X11†and just 20 (physical) pages, it’s only just over 1/8“ thick. It’s about the size of a comic book.
It’s illogical, but it is hard to reconcile that size book with the price. It helped when I took Costco standard printing rates for photos and priced out a 200 photo run of various sizes. The iPhoto is actually competitive, on a cost per photo basis.
Still, I think I need to try to make a bigger book next time.
Technorati Tags: Apple, Blog, Computer, Mac, MacBook, OSX, Photos, iLife, iPhoto