Printing Photos From iPhoto

Take a look at some of the different ways you can print photos from iPhoto. You can use the standard print function to print one or more photos, group them on pages, and even include titles and other information. You can also use Pages to create more interesting printouts of single photos, groups of photos, or multiple copies of the same photo. Another option is to create a book and print one or more pages from it.

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at all the different printing options you have in iPhoto.
I'm using iPhoto version 9.5. I'm going to show you printing photos. Now of course you can select photos. Let's go into an Event here and select a set of photos and you can Order Prints which is handy to do. But say you want to use your own printer.
Then you want to go to just the regular Print function and here you have a variety of options on the right. For instance you can fill each page with the photo. Fill it with a closer margin right there. This one will fit and fill. The difference is that Fit is going to make sure the entire photo is printed even if there has to be some larger margins above and below or left and right. Whereas Fill may crop out some parts of the photo like the left and right sides so it always fills the entire sheet.
You can do a standard 8 x 10 or you can also do 5 x7 or 4 x 6 and it will group those two per page. You can also choose Custom. Custom then will allow you to select an aspect ratio. In this case I'm just going to leave it there on Custom effect and then I'm going to change the photo size. So you can shrink it down or enlarge it. If it gets too large for one page it will go here. So 5 x 2 is a little bit too long. So let's just do something standard like a 4 x 3 and you can see here as I adjust say the width the height will automatically adjust to fit. So it turns out a 4 x 3 I can fit all six photos here on one page.
Now another variation on this to go to Contact Sheet. What Contact Sheet is going to give you that the others aren't are captions and things underneath. So here you can adjust all sorts of different things. Like the margins between the photos and you can adjust how many columns are involved. If you get too many columns here it will then go to another page. So you are not really worrying about the picture size per se but how many you can fit on a page here. So we do it like that.
Also you can go to Captions and there is a whole bunch of different styles for Captions here that you can use and you can add things like descriptions. This is photo has a description on it. The camera that was used. You can include Keywords, Filename. All sorts of things that can come in handy you can put there in the Caption and print them out. So it is not so much printing to use for typical purposes but maybe to print these out for someone to be able to look at them and pick one they like. Or just for you to kind of have a printed archive of your photos. 
Remember with any of these you can always print to PDF. So I can go to Print. I can choose my printer and all the options that are specific to my printer but I can also go to PDF and open it in Preview or Save directly to a PDF file.
You also have the ability to do some interesting things like Add PDF to iBooks. So image, for instance, if I were to select all my photos, say several hundred from a set, and then print it like this it would be many pages. Add PDF directly to iBooks and then in iBooks on my iPad I've got this book that I can page through showing all my photos.
So there is a lot of cool little things you can do if you kind of think outside the box with the options in the PDF menu.
Now in any of these layouts where you can adjust the picture so pretty much everything except for Fit and Contact Sheet, because Contact Sheet is driven by the number of columns, you can click on a photo and then zoom in on it and even adjust what part of the photo you want to print out. So you can do that without adjusting the photo itself. The original photo isn't touched it is just on this printout it is going to zoom in this area of the photo. So you have the ability to do that.
Of course you can use other apps to print the photos from your iPhoto collection as well.  For instance, let's go into Pages here and create a blank document where I can view the layout and see the entire page. I am going to go to Setup and turn off the document body so I basically have a page layout document here. Then go to Media and there is my photos from iPhoto, the ones we were just looking at. So I can select one. It will put it in here and then I've got a ton of options how to size it to fit on this page.
So, for instance, I can go in and add a cool border to it like a picture frame border. I can do some adjustments. I can go ahead and add some text and put the text underneath as a caption if I want. So there is a lot of different things I can do. I can even put shapes like arrows to point at things if I want to. So there is a lot you can do if you exit iPhoto but still use the photos there and use another app like Pages to create something really cool. Then I can print this out onto a sheet and the photo will still be the same quality but now I've got all this extra stuff that I've done and put on the page.
You can also use Pages to do something that is really not possible to do in iPhoto, in the current version. You can print multiple copies of the same photo. So just going to take this photo back down to normal size here with normal options. Set it to be about 3 inches wide and then I'm going to option drag to create duplicates of it. Then I'll take the time to align these up and then print this page out and then I can have multiple copies of the same photo on one sheet of paper on my printer.
One last option I want to show you is to create a book. You usually think of creating these as things you have Apple print for you. But you can create a book here and just select anything you want, create it, and you end up with pages in the book that you can print. You don't have to send it to Apple. So you can go here and say Print and you get pages from the book here.
For instance, if I were to design just a page out of the book like this one right here and I wanted to send that to my printer, I can see that is page 4 so I just send from 4 to 4 to the printer. That is kind of handy to have and you can do some nice design work in these books ignoring the pages that you are not actually going to print and just working on designing some cool pages that can be used to print at home.
Of course you can also save these out as PDFs. So it is also handy to create say a book that you never intend to print but intend to save as a PDF and view it that way.

Comments: 15 Responses to “Printing Photos From iPhoto”

Dr.Bernard Loewenthal

10 years ago

Excellent presentation! Lots I did not know. Thanks!

MaryAnne Casella

Wow! Thanks for so much new (to me) information!!

Junaid Kureshi

Wow, thats very very useful video, never thought of printing book directly through my printer. Thanks Gary.

Carol Harness

Gary, this was a very useful video explanation. You do such a good service.
Thanks so much.

Adele McIntosh

Great video. I have been using older versions of iPhoto, and am so glad to discover all these great options in the newest version. PS, looks like you were on an Alaska Cruise, one of my faves!

Gary Rosenzweig

Not a cruise, but I have been to Alaska a few times.

Bob Joubert

Excellent!! Thanks very much Gary for the concise yet comprehensive explanations

Joe Sandusky

Gary, this was excellent, but i would like to take it a little further and not sure how to get there. I would like to prepare collages of various photos with a blurred or cloud like edge at different angles. The total number may be up to 12 - 15 photos per 8 1/2 X 11. Is this possible within iPhoto?

For something like that you'd want to use graphics software like Photoshop or Pixelmator. You may also find some custom photo editing or printing software in the App Store if you look.

Kerrie Redgate

GIMP is now available for Mac. It's a free open source program that is similar to photoshop. I use it all the time, really great, does wondrous things but may take some time to discover it all. gimp.org

Betti Franceschi

Please please make this so I can set up an email exactly this way.. it's fine for printing, but i desperately need to email documents that I design this way.. and email them not as PDFs but directly visible as emails.

Emailing as PDFs is what you want to do. The problem with sending them as regular email is that every email client (Mail, Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, mobile, iPad, etc) will show it differently. And each client has settings that the user can customize too. So sending complex designs in email is impossible. Email just isn't designed that way.

Mary

Is is possible to put the text right in the photo?

You mean like overlaying the text on the photo. That's something you can do with a graphics app. See http://macmost.com/adding-text-to-images-with-pixelmator.html

Yes, thank you so much.

Comments Closed.

Printing Photos From iPhoto

Comments: 15 Responses to “Printing Photos From iPhoto”

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