Exporting Photos From iPhoto

iPhoto stores your photos inside a library. If you need to use a photo as a separate file, you can export one or more photos. Export options include the ability to shrink the file dimensions and reduce the quality to produce a smaller file. You can also drag and drop out of iPhoto to the Finder for a quick export of the original photo.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you all the different ways you can export photos from iPhoto.
I'm using iPhoto version 9.5 and I'm going to show you the export options. There are tons of options to be able to share a photo but I'm not going to talk about those. I'm going to talk about if you select a single photo and you want to export it from your iPhoto library. At the end I'm going to show you the easiest, quickest and maybe best way to do it.
But for now let's look at the options inside File Export. There is a lot of them. We're going to concentrate right now on File Export. You can export photos as a Web Page or a video Slideshow. But File Export is where you get your photos out and you can save them in the original format that they are in or JPEG or another format here.
JPEG is probably what you want for most photos. You can select a quality option. You don't have more specifics here but you can go Medium, High, Maximum. Medium is probably good enough if you are going to be sharing a photo by email or posting it to a webpage. You can also include some things on the photo. We'll see how those turn out. 
You can select the size. Full Size which is the original size of the photo. Small, medium, and large are Custom. With Custom you can basically specify a maximum width, a maximum height, or just a maximum of one of the two. So let's just go to a say medium size photo. Then you can determine the type of file name you are going to use. Of course you can change this very easily afterwards so it is not that important.
If you are going to do several photos, if I had selected several, I could choose a prefix. Say photo and it would do photo 1, photo 2, photo 3.
So let's export this photo here and save it to the desktop. So if we hide iPhoto we can see there is the file on the desktop. It is definitely a smaller size than before. We can actually look at it here. Command I tells us it is 65K whereas if we were to go to iPhoto and let's say export that same photo. Let's do same quality but for size let's go to a Large size and export and then we'll call this with a slightly different name. Now when I hide I've got two photos here. I can see this one is larger, obviously, not just in dimensions but if I get information on this I can see it is 65K for the smaller one and then 218K for the larger photo.
Now I'm going to select another photo. This is one I took with my iPhone so it has GPS information in it. When I export I'm going to use the same options and I've got Location Information selected just to show you what that does. I'm going to export and then hide iPhoto. I'm going to double click on it to open it up in Preview. In Preview I'm going to use Command I to get information about it. You can see all this information that is included with JPEG. I can click on GPS and sure enough it has the GPS location for the photo. If I had not checked that box off the GPS data would be blank in this exported version of the photo.
I've been showing you how to export one photo. Go into it and do File Export. But you can export multiple photos. Select them. Select an entire Event. Select an entire Album. All sorts of different ways you can select photos and then export, and then your exporting all of these photos. So you can do them in groups just like that.
Now exporting is great if you want to shrink the file down to post it on the web or send to a friend or do something else with it. But what if you want to get the original photo. The actual full resolution photo that you've got in iPhoto out of the iPhoto library and as a file in the Finder that you can use somewhere else.
Well there is two ways to do it, the hard way and the easy way. So let's select this photo here and export and do it the hard way. We can select Kind as original and there we go. We're going to export now this file and we could save it to the desktop and it's going to give us the original file out as a file by itself outside of the iPhoto library.
But there is an easier way to do it. You could simply, this is the desktop and this is iPhoto, you can just drag and drop and it is as easy as that. You get the original that way. You can do it with groups. You want to get these three out here, drag and drop, and now there they are. You can but them into a Finder window. You can drag them onto a desktop, you can even drag them into other applications.
So, for instance, if I want to open this up in another app. I can simply drag and drop to any app that accepts a photo, like Preview, and there you go. I didn't have to export and save it somewhere. I can just go right from iPhoto to another app.

Comments: 8 Responses to “Exporting Photos From iPhoto”

Jennifer

10 years ago

When you export a photo as an original either by exporting or drag and drop, does it remove it from your library? The easiest method is drag and drop, I'm assuming unless you want to change the photos size that is the best way????

Gary Rosenzweig

No, exporting either way does not remove it from your library. If you want the best quality image (but large file size to go with it) then drag and drop is the easiest way.

Ron

The word "original" confuses me. In the iPhoto Library this tends to mean the initial, unedited image imported into iPhoto (ie, "Revert to Original"). When I export the "Original," does this mean the UNedited photo first brought into iPhoto or the one that is current right now in iPhoto. (I tend to edit/crop most of my photos.)

Try it, you'll see. It gives you a version that has the edits, but the original resolution, rather than a more compressed version.

Tricia

Why, when I do drag and drop to the desktop, do I lose the file name of the photo?

Hard for me to say. What is it naming it instead?

phil

9 years ago

relating to opening pictures in iPhoto by clicking on the image i receive the following message, "The document “P1060560.jpg” could not be opened. Image Capture cannot open files in the “JPEG image” format." what can i use to open "jpeg" images and avoid image capture?

Use Preview.

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Exporting Photos From iPhoto

Comments: 8 Responses to “Exporting Photos From iPhoto”

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