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Chapter 9 Sharing Your Photos Digitally

In the previous chapter, I talked about how you can use your photographs to create physical keepsakes such as books, cards, and calendars to share your photos with your family and friends. In this chapter, you’ll explore all of the digital ways to share your photos. You’ll learn how to easily upload your pictures from iPhoto to Facebook, Flickr, and MobileMe. You’ll also learn how to export your photos to iWeb and iDVD. I’ll also discuss ordering professionally made prints of your photographs in the chapter for completeness sake, because it’s grouped in the menu that allows you to share your photos digitally, the Share menu.

The Share Menu As you can see in Figure 9–1, the Share button lies in the right corner in iPhoto’s toolbar. The icon looks like a box with an arrow bursting out of it. Clicking the button displays the Share menu, which contains five options. These include ordering physical prints of your photos; uploading your photos to your MobileMe Gallery, Flickr account, or Facebook account; and lastly, e-mailing your photographs.

M. Grothaus, Talking Your iPhoto '11 to the Max © Michael Grothaus 2011 167 168 CHAPTER 9: Sharing Your Photos Digitally

Figure 9–1. The Share menu

Ordering Prints Remember the days when you would take photos with a film camera and then go to your local drugstore to have them printed? It was kind of expensive, somewhat of a pain, and, unless you went to the more expensive one-hour photo places, a long wait before you had nice glossy prints of your photographs. Nowadays, the traditional print is being usurped by photo sharing sites such as Flickr, digital picture frames, and smartphones. However, sometimes it’s still nice to have a printed photograph. You can of course print your own photos from within iPhoto using the FilePrint command in iPhoto’s menu bar, but that’s handy only if you have a really good photo printer. Sometimes it’s nice to send professional-quality prints to people who still like physical copies, such as grandparents. With this in mind, Apple has given iPhoto users a way to order physical prints of photos in their iPhoto Library and send them to anyone, anywhere in the world. Here’s how: 1. Select one or more photos from your iPhoto Library. 2. Click the Share button in iPhoto’s toolbar, and then click Order Prints. 3. In the Order Prints window that appears (Figure 9–2), select the size of each print and the number of copies of each print that you want. For one photo, you can order prints of multiple sizes. As you enter the size and number of prints, the subtotaled cost updates at the bottom of the screen. 4. (Optional) If you know you want the same size and number of copies for all your selected photos, use the Quick Order drop-down menu at the upper right of the order screen to choose the size, and then choose the number of copies using the up or down arrow. CHAPTER 9: Sharing Your Photos Digitally 169

Figure 9–2. The Order Prints window

5. Click the Buy Now button when you are done choosing your print sizes and copies. 6. On the Your Order screen that appears, enter a shipping zip code, and choose a shipping method. 7. Click the Check Out button. 8. On the next screen, you’ll need to enter your Apple ID and click Sign In. If you have an iTunes account, you have an Apple ID. If not, you can create one on this screen. 9. Once you have signed in, the Confirm Order Details window appears. This is where you can enter the shipping address for the prints. When you are done, click the Place Order button. 10. Click Done to complete the order.

Sharing Your Photos Online iPhoto’s order prints feature is cool, but let’s be honest, it’s still a slow way to share your photos. After you order your prints, you still have to wait for them to arrive by mail. A much faster way to share your photos with friends and family is by doing so online. Before you can share your photos using the built-in sharing tools in iPhoto, you need to make sure you have accounts with the three web sites iPhoto integrates with. Those web sites are MobileMe, Facebook, and Flickr. For Facebook and Flickr, visit their web sites at www.facebook.com and www.flickr.com to sign up for a free account. If you want to use iPhoto with MobileMe sharing, however, you are going to have to purchase a MobileMe membership. 170 CHAPTER 9: Sharing Your Photos Digitally

MobileMe is Apple’s collection of online services including e-mail, contacts, calendars, online storage, and sharing services. Currently a MobileMe membership is $99 per year. You can find out more about MobileMe at www.apple.com/mobileme.

Setting Up Internet Accounts to Use in iPhoto Once you have one or more of the online accounts needed for integrated iPhoto sharing, you’ll need to make sure you have logged into those accounts through iPhoto. This enables you to perform publishing from within iPhoto directly to those accounts. To set up Internet accounts in iPhoto, follow these steps: 1. Choose FilePreferences from iPhoto’s menu bar. 2. In the Preferences window that appears, click the Accounts button. The Accounts pane appears and displays any accounts you already have set up (Figure 9–3).

Figure 9–3. iPhoto’s Accounts pane

3. In the Accounts pane, click the (+) button. A menu appears asking you to choose the type of account you want to add (Figure 9–4). Select one, and click Add. CHAPTER 9: Sharing Your Photos Digitally 171

Figure 9–4. Choosing the account type you’d like to add

4. A dialog box appears (Figure 9–5). Enter your account user name and password in it, and click Log In.

Figure 9–5. Account login dialog box

5. You user name and password are validated, and the account is added to the Accounts list. Once you have enabled your accounts, they appear in iPhoto’s source list under the Web header. You accounts are named after the name associated with the particular account. In Figure 9–6 you can see that the accounts are also identified with icons. The blue and white f symbolizes a Facebook account, the blue and pink dots are a Flickr account, and the white cloud and blue sky is a MobileMe account. 172 CHAPTER 9: Sharing Your Photos Digitally

Figure 9–6. Internet accounts show up in iPhoto’s source list under the Web header.

MobileMe As I mentioned earlier, MobileMe is Apple’s suite of online services. Some people love MobileMe; others think the $99 annual fee is a rip-off when there are other free services on the Web that provide the same things MobileMe does (for example, Gmail offers free e-mail, and Flickr offers free photo sharing). I like MobileMe a lot because it’s so integrated into the entire Apple experience across your Macs and iOS devices such as iPhones and iPads. Again, you can decide for yourself whether MobileMe is right for you and find out more about MobileMe at www.apple.com/mobileme.

Publishing Photos to a MobileMe Gallery To publish photos to a MobileMe gallery, follow these steps: 1. From your iPhoto Library, select the photo or photos you want to publish.You can also choose to publish an entire event or album. To do so, simply select the event by clicking it or choose the album by clicking it in iPhoto’s source list. 2. Once you have selected your photos, album, or event, click the Share button in iPhoto’s toolbar, and then choose MobileMe Gallery from the pop-up menu. CHAPTER 9: Sharing Your Photos Digitally 173

3. The Share menu expands to become the MobileMe Galleries menu you see in Figure 9–7. From this menu you can choose New Album, which creates a new album on your MobileMe gallery containing the photos you have selected, or you can click any of the other albums in your MobileMe gallery to add your currently selected photos to that album. If you want to add photos to an existing MobileMe gallery, click that gallery, and you’ll get a confirmation that the photos were uploaded to it, and then you are done. However, if you are uploading your photos to a new album in your MobileMe gallery, click the New Album button and follow the rest of the steps.

Figure 9–7. The MobileMe Galleries menu

4. After you have selected New Album, a dialog box appears with a host of MobileMe gallery settings for the new album you are creating (Figure 9–8).

Figure 9–8. MobileMe gallery publishing settings 174 CHAPTER 9: Sharing Your Photos Digitally

The settings are as follows:  Album Name: This is the name of the album in your MobileMe gallery. By default, this is the name of the event of the iPhoto album you are uploading the photos from. You can change it to any name you want in the text box.  Album Viewable By: This allows you to select who can view your album online. When set to Everyone, anyone with the web address of your album can view it. Only Me sets the album to private, and only you can view it online. Choosing Edit Names and Passwords displays another dialog box that lets you set up specific user names and passwords to give to your friends and family. Only people with the correct user names and passwords are able to view the web page with your photos.  Allow: This selection has three options. You can check one, two, or all three. Downloading of photos or entire album: When selected, viewers of your gallery are able to download your photos to their computer. Uploading of photos via web browser: When selected, viewers of your gallery are able to upload their own photos to your MobileMe gallery. Adding of photos via e-mail: When selected, you or others are able to add photos to your gallery via e-mail.  Show: When Photo titles is checked, the titles or file names of your photos are displayed in your gallery. When Email address for uploading photos is selected, an e-mail address is displayed that you or others can send photos to. Any photos sent to this e-mail are uploaded to your MobileMe gallery.  Advanced: Hide album on my Gallery page hides your album on your MobileMe gallery page, but users can still access it if they know the direct web URL of the album.  Download Quality: This allows you to set the quality of the photographs that people can download from your gallery. Choose Optimized for high-quality images that can be printed up to 16x20 inches. Choose Actual Size to let people download the photos at the same size as the original. Choosing Actual Size can mean longer download times. 5. Once you have chosen your publishing settings, click Publish. Your photos begin uploading to a new album in your MobileMe gallery. CHAPTER 9: Sharing Your Photos Digitally 175

Viewing Your MobileMe Galleries Once you have published photos to your MobileMe galleries, you can view them on the Web or in iPhoto. Let’s look at them in iPhoto first. As you can see in Figure 9–9, you can select your MobileMe account in iPhoto’s source list under the Web header. Your MobileMe Gallery is displayed in the body of iPhoto’s window.

Figure 9–9. Viewing your MobileMe gallery in iPhoto

 MobileMe account: This is the name of your MobileMe account.  Upload indicator: This is a swirling arrow that is shown when iPhoto is in the process of uploading photos to your MobileMe gallery.  Gallery link: Clicking this arrow opens your web browser and takes you to the main MobileMe Gallery page.  Albums: The main body of iPhoto’s window shows you all the albums that your MobileMe gallery contains. iPhoto syncs with your MobileMe account to show you photos in your MobileMe galleries that have been uploaded outside of iPhoto. Although you can view these photos in iPhoto, they are not saved in your actual iPhoto Library. I’ll talk about saving synced photos later. Simply double-click any album in your gallery to view the contents of it. Figure 9–10 shows an individual MobileMe Gallery album when viewed in iPhoto. 176