MacMost Now 505: Emailing iPhoto Slideshows

You can email a slideshow to a friend by exporting the slideshow from iPhoto as a video and then attaching that file to the message. But there are many good reasons not to use email, but instead share the video online and send a link instead.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi. This is Gary with MacMost Now. Today I'm going to show you how to email an iPhoto slideshow and then I'm going to tell you why you shouldn't. 
So I've been getting this question a lot recently. How do you email a slide show that you made in iPhoto? Let's take a look. So let me quickly create a slideshow here in iPhoto. I'm going to go into an event select all the photos in the event, click the create button and choose slideshow. You can go to episode 472 for more information about these slideshow settings. I'm going to set a theme here and you can change the music, other things as well and I can preview with the preview button here which will show the slideshow inside of iPhoto. 
So let's say I want to email the slideshow to somebody. Well, the way to do that would be to export. You can use the export button here at the bottom and export as a video and then email them the video. Now, you have several choices here. You get to choose the size. Let's choose medium just as an example. Now you also want to look for this automatically send slideshow to iTunes. You probably don't want to use that since you're going to be exporting the file and you want to email that. It's not like you want to add this to your iTunes collection. You can select the custom export options if you don't want to use one of these sizes and you can also choose all sorts of different video formats. But we might as well stick with one of these standard ones here and choose a medium. I'm going to click export and I'll start exporting the video. It's gonna select the iPhoto slideshows folder, which is under pictures. I can put it anywhere I want. So say I can actually click on desktop and have it save it to the desktop and click OK and it will start exporting the slideshow. 
OK, so now it's done I can hide iPhoto and I can see here on my desktop is the file it created. Let me select it and get info on it with command I and I can see that it's 14.4 Megs and it's one minute and eleven seconds. This is a standard M4V, a Quicktime movie, H264 compression in it. Should play on any MAC and Windows, although it may not work on older Windows computers, but is a good general format. I can preview it by using Quicklook. I'll just select it and it clicks space and there I can see it there in Quicklook and I can flip through it. 
So now you can just send an email and attach that file to the email message and you can send your slideshow to a friend. 
So why wouldn't you want to do this? It has to do with the file size. This was 14 Megs and was only 13 photos. Imagine if it was 30 or 40 photos. So this is going to be trouble for people who have limited email inbox space. It's going to be trouble for people that can only get messages with attachments of a certain size. Even if you can get the message if you have a typical internet connection it's going to take a lot of time to download a 20 or 30 Meg file. You have to upload it and they have to download it. It's a lot of bandwidth. So what I recommend doing is sharing it instead of emailing it. You can share it, say with a video service like Youtube. Upload it to Youtube, even make it private just so only a few people can see it. You can also upload videos to Facebook and lots of other video services as well and then you can just email people a link.
You may also want to consider sharing just the photos using a service like Flickr or Picasa. Or if you use MobileMe to share the photos somebody can actually view the photos themselves or view a slideshow of the photos. So, instead of uploading a video you upload the actual photos and they can still view it as a slideshow. I find the 60 dollar a year price on MobileMe is worth it just for this, especially if you have to share photos and slideshows with friends and family around the world quite often. 
If you do want to email something I suggest maybe going to the mobile size for the smallest possible file and limiting how many photos you put in your file. Really try to bring that size down as far as you can and send a small file as you can. 
You can also use a free file sharing service like Drawbox to share the file as well. Just upload it there and email a link to it. 
So I hope you found this useful. Til next time this is Gary with MacMost mail.

Comments: 5 Responses to “MacMost Now 505: Emailing iPhoto Slideshows”

Michael

14 years ago

I would have rendered the video size first, saved it, THEN e-mailed it.

Howard Watson

I enjoy Gary's narrative on the videos. He goes a little fast with the demos. Would help if he slowed down just a bit so I could follow his cursor positions.
Always good stuff

NY educator

You are incredible Gary!
Thank you so much for sharing your expertise so quickly and clearly, and freely!! You out shine anything else I've seen done for mac tutorials. I am posting here, but it was your iMovie 09 tutorials that blew me away. You took such a complex program and broke it down into such manageable steps.

crystal

12 years ago

what file size would you save it with to load to FB?

Gary Rosenzweig

I would do something rather small. It depends on how fast your connection is. Try different settings to get something you like that won't be too big of a file.

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MacMost Now 505: Emailing iPhoto Slideshows

Comments: 5 Responses to “MacMost Now 505: Emailing iPhoto Slideshows”

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