YES YOU CAN USE iPhoto 8.0...Think outside the box

[ScottG]

YES YOU CAN USE iPhoto 8.0

Think outside the box..You do all the work in iPhoto 8.0.

1. Print the book out of iPhoto with The pdf option.

2. Then either bring it into Acrobat or another Pdf app that will Save the pages out as single pages. Or you can Print/PDF Option out of iPhoto into 1 page per photo layout.

3. Then Start the Mac BookMaker - MyPublisher Application.

4. Choose 1 Photo per page Option and drop in the full page pictures with full bleed. (This works just fine and I've done it with MyPublisher a few times already, and even others who also don't support iPhoto At All.)

This is how its done anyway when iPhoto does the upload of the files as a Full PDF layout with the pictures and background as one page per large photo. Yes an extra step and you end up with 22 pictures being put into BookMaker as full page bleeds, but who cares! All the creative work is being done in iPhoto. Again I starting doing this when MyPublisher was giving better deals to the Windows Users if they use the PC version of BookMaker verse the Mac users.

ScottG

It's worth the trouble, and the files come out of iPhoto Full Rez.

ScottG

[kds]

Wow! Good idea. Thanks for the idea.

A few questions. Is the resolution of the PDF file saved by iPhoto of good enough resolution? What does the quality of the resulting MyPublisher book look like?
My books contain quite a few full page pictures, so good resolution is important.
Same for the pages with a lot of pictures. Does the resolution/quality seem okay to you?

Also, just out of curiousity, which software do you use to split out the PDF file into individual pages? Is this free ware, or something you purchased?

Any other "outside of the box" suggestions are very welcome too!
Thanks again!

[kds]

Hi there

Okay - some tips and some questions.

So, I went into the iPhoto book.
Went to Print. Went to Advanced. Selected a single page (due to the front cover pages, what looks like Page 1 in the book is really Page 3 according to the Print/Advanced page). Then PDF/Save as PDF. Named it PageX.
This saves a PDF file on my machine for a single page in my photobook.

Then I opened up this PDF file on the Mac, and said: File/Save as JPG.
I selected the best quality. (MP would accept the PDF, and needed a JPG).

The resulting JPG file can be brought into MP and can be dropped into full page just as you specified.

Question:

To figure out how the resolution is affected by this PDF process, I created a page in iPhoto which consists of a single image. The original image had a resolution of 2592x1944. This means I should be able to print it about 13x10. So, for the standard large book this is fine.

The JPGs generated from the one-page PDF file has a resolution of 1584x1224 - considerably less than my original image.

Why doesn't My Publisher give me a resolution warning when I try to put this image (generated by going from JPG->iPhoto->PDF->JPG) on a full page? A 1584x1224 image should only be good enough for 8x6 printing, right???

Did I do something wrong?? Is there a way to improve the resolution of the PDF/JPG??

Thanks! Great idea!

[leandract]

THANK YOU for posting this hint.

Of course this is what the iPhoto plug probably used to do....

The workflow in iPhoto 8.0 is so much easier and less buggy than the My Publisher software. I did a test where I made an 8.5x11 iPhoto book, printed it to a PDF, opened in Adobe Acrobat Pro, saved as high quality JPEGs (pages are automatically split), imported the JPEGS into MyPublisher 3.0, added enough pages to my new book and made them all single images no text, and then used autobuild to drop the jpegs as single pages into a deluxe 11.5x15 book. Online at least, they look great. Since the aspect ratio of the two books is about the same, there's not much cropping and I will look at this in more detail. I haven't checked the JPEG dpi dimensions, but I have a 10mpixel camera, so too may pixels is usually my problem.

And did I mention this took me less than an hour to pick out the photos, drop 28 pages worth of them in iPhoto and do the export described above? I worked for hours last night with the My publisher software...


AND the added bonus of this workflow is that I can have a PDF of my book (e.g. the one I made in iphoto)

AND I can easily export all my book jpeg photos from iphoto.

I backup these photos and the PDF onto a disk and then I put this disk in an envelop in the back of the book as well as in a fire box.

AWESOME!