Time-Saving Tips: Get creative with iLife

Working with photos and editing video can be fun, but that doesn’t mean you want to spend all your free time in front of the computer. Here are 18 simple iLife tricks that'll speed you through the boring parts.

Apple releases minor iPhoto update

According to the release notes, iPhoto 7.1.5 “improves the printing quality of books, cards and calendars ordered via the iPhoto printing service.”

iPhoto2Gmail updated to version 1.0

While most people are probably satisfied to send their photos from iPhoto through their Gmail accounts using Mail, some people would rather have a more direct option. For example, sending large files through Mail seems to be no problem for me, yet from the same network with exactly the same settings, my wife's Mail chokes and spits and frequently fails when she tries to send a bunch (or even a few) pictures from iPhoto. Tired of playing with her SMTP settings and getting everything working for one message, just to have it fail on the next one, I finally went in search of a more direct approach. My wife and I are both "switchers," and back in Windows we were used to Picasa, which has the ability to send photos via a Gmail account built-in. Makes sense, since Google owns Picasa, but that's exactly what I was looking hoping to get iPhoto to do. In my searches I came across an iPhoto plugin called iPhoto2Gmail. When I tried it last week, it hung my iPhoto instance every time I tried it and I had to force quit iPhoto. I gave up on iPhoto2Gmail, but couldn't find anything else. In desperation, I went back to have another look at iPhoto2Gmail and discovered that it had been updated to version 1.0. Crossing my fingers, I gave it a try, and... it works great! Though I don't need it on my machine, I really like the direct simplicity of sending my photos from right inside iPhoto, and I think I'll continue to use iPhoto2Gmail. If you've been struggling with sending photos through a Gmail account, this might be a useful option for you.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

iWork and iLife ‘09 to share the spotlight Tuesday?

Well, despite Apple’s invite making it very clear that the “focus would be on notebooks” at Tuesday’s special event, word is now trickling out that we may be seeing some token updates to both the iLife and iWork suites. Mac Soda, the same folks who brought us the nVidia graphics card in the new MacBooks [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "iWork and iLife ‘09 to share the spotlight Tuesday?", url: "http://macenstein.com/default/archives/1724" });

Enable Spotlight indexing in iPhoto 6

For those of you still stuck with iPhoto 6, I discovered how to enable Spotlight to properly index iPhotos -- including keywords, titles and other details. I am not sure if this applies to every iPhoto 6 user, but in my iPhoto 6 application, Apple forgot to tell Spotlight what to look for. Follow these steps to fix this: Open /Applications, Control-click on iPhoto, and select Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu. In the new window that opens, locate the Contents/Info.plist file. Open TextEdit, and drag the Info.plist file onto the TextEdit icon in the Dock to open it. Please make a copy of the file before editing, just in case! At the end of the file, just before </dict></plist>, insert the following code: <key>UTExportedTypeDeclarations<...

Another method of using an external editor in iPhoto

I wasn't happy with the red eye editing in iPhoto, so I bought Photoshop Elements 6, which gives much better results. One thing I discovered is that with iPhoto open, I can drag a photo onto Elements in the dock, do the red eye adjustment, save it, and the newly-adjusted photo appears directly where it was in iPhoto. The original can still be reverted, too.[robg adds: iPhoto offers, of course, the Edit Photo pop-up in the General section of its preferences, where you can specify any image editing program to use when editing a photo. I wasn't aware, however, that you could (successfully) drag-and-drop an image from iPhoto to a program in the dock.]