MacMost Now 556: iPhoto Printing Tricks

iPhoto's printing capability is pretty basic, unless you look closely. You can print multiple photos on a page, print multiple copies of the same photo, or even copies of the same photo with different adjustments applied to each copy. You can also print single pages from iphoto books to make more interesting printouts.

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

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode, let me show you some iphoto printing tricks. 
So, a lot of people get frustrated by iPhoto's printing options. There's actually a lot you can do there, but it's not all obvious. Let me show you some of the most common requests.
So, let's say you want to print several photos on a page. So, you select four photos here in an event, and you go to 'file', 'print'. It now comes up and you can print a photo that covers the entire page, a contact sheet like that, something with a simple border, one photo per page, or several matte. But suppose you want to print all four photos nicely on the page, not like this? Well, the trick is you want to hit the 'customize' button; when you do that, you go into a completely different mode in iphoto. And here in this printing mode, you can select several things. The first thing you want to do is go down to the bottom and select 'themes', and here's where you can choose exactly how you want things to look. So you may want to pick 'standard' for instance, and that's just going to put one photo over and entire sheet. But say I want to put all four photos together on one sheet, I would go to a simple border theme. And from that, then I can adjust the background if I want, adjust the borders if I want. I can also adjust the layout here at the bottom, and say I want four per page and choose exactly how I want those four to look. And you can see now I've got all four photos on a single page. Now I just hit the print button to send it to my printer. 
Now, suppose I wanted to have four copies of the same photo on a page. You can do that in iPhoto, as well. So let me cancel this here, and select the one photo that I want to print. Go to 'file', 'print', and I'm going to hit 'customize' again. And then what I'm going to do here is under themes, is again select a simple border, and under a layout I'm going to select 'four'. You can see what's happened here, it's going to show me four different spots but I only have one photo to fill it. At the top here, I have a little browser, and I'm browsing now the pages in my printout, but I can switch to browsing the photos I'm going to print out. I can drag-and-drop, so I can drop that photo to all four locations. I can even adjust these individually. So say I wanted to take this one right here and I zoom in on it, and I can even use the hand here to reposition exactly what area of the photo is zoomed in. 
Another theme I can do is play around with the contact sheet theme. And here, I can also add multiples, just by dragging, this down here, and I can just fill in the blanks.
Another thing you can do is adjust these images individually. So, for instance, I'll leave this one plain, I'll take this one and I'll hit the adjust button, and I'll adjust it and say, have it print out with that effect. I'll select this one, hit 'adjust', use that effect. And this one, I'll just increase the definition and highlights. And now I've got four versions of the same photo I can print out on the same page and then compare. 
Now another thing you can do is select several photos, instead of saying print, you can go and create a book or a card. Let's create a book here, and just choose from one of the many, many themes here, something you like. Maybe just worry about the front cover, like, let's do this: let's create the book, but we're not going to order anything from Apple. Instead what we're going to do is go into just this front page here: we can make adjustments to these photos, drag and drop photos to them, do all sorts of things, change what's here, and, we can even change the layout tons of options that are meant for printing books, but, you can simply decide to print a single page of this. I'm going to print the first page as a cover, go from one-to-one, so just printing that one page, that's all I really want out of this. 
So getting to know your way around the book creation interface is can be useful for just printing out single pages at home, even if you're never actually going to order a book.
And if you want to go the opposite way, and actually make things even more simpler, one of the things you can do is simply drag a photo to another application. Like, say, I'm going to drag it below here- you can't see it- but to preview, and I've just opened up the photo in preview. Now, I can simply print from preview with much simpler, quicker options than doing it from iPhoto.
So there are some iPhoto 11 printing tricks that I use. Hope you found this useful. Til next time, this is Gary with MacMost Now.
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Comments: 13 Responses to “MacMost Now 556: iPhoto Printing Tricks”

Nina

14 years ago

VERY helpful, Gary. Thanks.

rick

Very nice. Thanks. Question...is there any way to print...say a 4 by 6 or 5 by 7
photo with any options for printing in iPhoto? Know you can print columns but is there a way to print specific sizes? Say I wanted to print a page of 2 by 2 of the same photo....can this be done? thanks, again
Rick

Gary Rosenzweig

Do you mean inches? 4x6 inches? That sort of thing? I'd think what you would do is to get 4x6 inch photo paper. Then choose that paper size in the original print dialog that comes up.

Joe W

I print 4x6 inch prints all the time with iPhoto. My HP printer even has a seperate paper tray for 4x6 photo paper. Yes, choose 4x6 as the paper size, just make sure you choose the borderless option.

Johndr

13 years ago

Costco will make 4x6 prints for $.13 each

Ouch. That's actually very expensive. Apple sells them for 12 cents, and that is expensive too. I've seen them for as little as 5 cents. But 9 cents is more common.

Jodie

Love this tutorial! Thank you

Aimee

Can you change the size of the simple border? I want to print four photos that take up the whole page rather than have a large border around them.

Thanks

Do you mean the margin around the outside of the page? If so, then that is usually limited by your printer. Some printers have a large merging, while others specialize in being able to print to the edge of a page.
If you mean the style for printing in iPhoto, just experiment. There are so many settings as you can see in this video. So try some others. (Print to PDF to experiment without wasting paper).

Dan

Thanks for the vid but you haven't explained how to "print multiple copies of the same photo" as per the vid description. My printer drinks ink like crazy so i like to batch up printing to stop it cleaning in between each print. So i select say 6 photos to print but want 4 of the 2nd and say 3 of the 5th. I can't find a way of doing this without duplicating the photo which is a pain. Any ideas?
Thanks.

I think you should watch the video again. I start talking about printing multiple copies of the same photo on one sheet at about 2:10.

CB Wiles

12 years ago

How do you change the color of the photo border when designing a book in iPhoto "11?
Thanks

I haven't tried all of the different themes, but I'd imagine there isn't a border color setting. It just is what it is. The idea is for them to be easy to use and quick -- so limited settings.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 556: iPhoto Printing Tricks

Comments: 13 Responses to “MacMost Now 556: iPhoto Printing Tricks”

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