Sharing Photo Journals With Keynote

You can use Keynote on your Mac to create photo journals by creatively arranging your photos on slides, then adding text and other design elements. You can then share these as view-only slideshows with iCloud.com. Other people can view these even if they do not use Macs or iCloud.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. In this episode let me show you how to use Keynote to create interesting photo journals that you can share with friends and family online.
So the old iPhoto app used to have a really cool journaling feature on the iPad that allowed you to create these really cool photo journals and share them online. Now that that's gone you can still use lots of different apps to create interesting online photo journals but you can actually do it on your Mac with the software you've got there.
You can use Keynote in conjunction with Photos or even just with images on your hard drive to create and share some really interesting photo journals with people. They don't need to have Keynote on their end. So,
In Keynote here we create a presentation. They're actually some here that are already meant for photos like Photo Essay and Photo Portfolio, things like that. But we can just start with a blank presentation where there is just a black background. We can create a simple photo album. You can put whatever you want in it that you would put in a normal Keynote.
So we can start off with a frame like that that doesn't even have any photos. You can add slides and then pick one of the default slides here. So let's pick this one because it has a bunch of photos in it. Notice that you can click on these little photo things here and then select a photo from your photos collection to add. So I can select that one there. I'll select another photo and, you know, it leaves you in the mode where you can edit the photo itself. So you can crop it, do all sorts of different things.
But let's just stick to the basic drag and drop stuff right now where you can add stuff. You can actually drag and drop photos in as well. So let's create another slide here that's just this big one here with this big photo. I'll drag a photo from the desktop in so you can see it is easy to do. 
You can also create slides that are just blank and add photos. So you can either drag and drop photos from Photos. So here's my Photos app running and I can go in here and just drag and drop right from Photos into Keynote and you'll see that it will insert that photo in there. It is kind of exporting it and importing it into Keynote and I can just move that around anyway I want. It's really easy to do. I can drag photos from the desktop as well which is what I just did. Just dragged from the Finder in there.
You can put all sorts of photos in here and do all sorts of cool things with them. Anything that you can do in Keynote. Now we're not going to do any kind of special transitions or animations or build in and build out because they're not going to translate because somebody is going to be viewing this in a browser. It's not going to have any functionality.
But I can do something like for style and choose a special frame and that will work. I can go into here, for instance, and I can go to Arrange and I can even Rotate something if I wanted to. We'll see that that actually is going to show up. Once I've got my presentation to what I want I can even add text and shapes here. So I can add some text and I can for shape add an arrow for instance. 
So after I've got everything like I want it I can go ahead and then Share this presentation so others can view it.
Now it is important to save this as a document in your iCloud account. So go to Save and choose iCloud, Keynote and save it in iCloud. Once you've done that, of course, it is saved to your local hard drive and it will sync to iCloud and be available in your other devices as well.
But once you've got it saved to iCloud now I can click the Share button and share a link to this on iCloud. Now when I share a link to it I get to set it to View Only or Allow Editing. Most cases for photo journals you want to set it to View Only. You want people to view your photos. You can then Invite people but you don't need to do that.
I'm going to switch to Copy Link which basically turns off the invitation thing and then we'll be able to just copy and paste a link into anything we want.
Another option here is to use a Password. So this is going to be at public URL that nobody will know it is there unless you tell them it is there. But if you really want some security you could add a password and then tell your friends and family what the password is. Just to add a little extra security although the chances of somebody stumbling upon your photo journal is slim. If somebody shares your photo journal with somebody else they can naturally share the password as well. You can use that if you want to.
Let's hit Share Presentation and it will go through a process, preparing to share, and when it's all done you can click the Share button again, you can view Share settings and under that you will see the Link and you can click on that to copy the link. You can also, if you want, reinvite people. You can do that clicking here and then sending them an email. So this link is all they need now to actually go and view this photo journal.
Now I'm using the browser Chrome instead of Safari. I'm doing that to demonstrate that you don't need to be using Safari on a Mac and the latest version of OS 10 to view this photo album. It actually works in any modern browser. I've even tested this on Windows and even though you get a message saying that not all features are supported it does show everything done in the photo album.
So, I'll go to this URL here, I've just pasted it in. I'm not signed into iCloud, I'm not using iCloud at all with this browser here. So you pretend this is somebody that does not have an iCloud account or maybe they're viewing it on a Mac that is not even theirs. After the local message there you can see the presentation. It is set to View Only. They can jump around to all the slides that they want. You can see here even the text and the arrow and framing was all put in place. Even the rotation.
Not only can they just view it but they have some other options as well. They can hit the Playback button and it goes full screen. They can use the arrow keys to move forward. Hit the Escape key to go back. That's just part of the browser functionality. It's nothing special to do with Keynote in particular. They even have the ability to Print and Download. 
So this is great for people if you want to share photos of your trip with your family members or friends and you want to put together a nice photo journal. You can do that in a similar way that you were able to do it in the past with iPhoto or with other apps. You can just do it here in Keynote and it works great. It gives you lots of chances to be very creative in how you present your photos and share them.

Comments: 3 Responses to “Sharing Photo Journals With Keynote”

Antrim

8 years ago

Great. I like that you are a Keynote fan. I rarely use it, but always find that your videos about Keynote encourage me to do more.

Paddy Zoller

7 years ago

I really like this, but if I understand correctly, a person cannot add music in addition to the builds. Thanks for always enlarging our Apple world.

Gary Rosenzweig

Paddy: I think you can. Just try it to test. If not, just use iMovie to add music afterward.

Comments Closed.

Sharing Photo Journals With Keynote

Comments: 3 Responses to “Sharing Photo Journals With Keynote”

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