This is the Safari online edition of the printed book.

Visual QuickStart Guide—the quick and easy way to learn!

With iPhoto '09 for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide, readers can start from the beginning to get a tour of the applications, or look up specific tasks to learn just what they need to know. This task-based, visual guide uses step-by-step instructions and hundreds of full-color screenshots to teach beginning and intermediate users how to make the most out of their digital photos with iPhoto '09. Perfect for anyone who needs to learn the program inside out, this guide covers everything from importing, tagging, editing, and perfecting images to creating slideshows and photo albums to easy online Web publishing. Readers will learn about everything new in iPhoto '09, including: Faces, which allows you to organize your photos based on who’s in them; Places, which uses data from GPS-enabled cameras or your iPhone's camera to categorize photos by location with easily recognizable names; themed slideshows; online sharing via Facebook and Flickr with one click; enhanced photo editing tools; and more.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 2 Ratings

Excellent guide to iPhoto 09 - 2009-07-02
Reviewer Rating:
iPhoto '09 Visual QuickStart Guide (1.0) by Adam Engst (PDF Version)

This new book comes in two versions; one as a PDF suited to reading on your screen or a Kindle DX, the other the traditional printed version. The PDF version is $15.00 while the print version is $16.49. They both have the same format and content and run to 240 pages. This review covers the PDF version.

A quick note for Kindle users - the PDF version works correctly on the new Kindle DX, although the text which is blue in the print version is a little pale on the Kindle. This book does not work correctly on the 1st generation Kindle and works haphazardly on the 2nd generation.

The book starts with the acquiring of iPhoto and covers all the ways of obtaining it and the updates and offers lots of advice on installing it. The section that covers importing photo's is very thorough, and offered two hints that I was unaware of, to import photo's from Apple Mail attachments and from Safari pictures. Although I am a longtime user of iPhoto I wouldn't classify myself as a power user, since I use Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom. The book goes onto cover creating multiple libraries; an issue that is barely mentioned by Apple, creating backups and then merging multiple libraries when necessary.

Perhaps the biggest subject for users will be dealing with faces, and to some extent places. Faces are largely identified automatically and then you can name them, individually or in groups, and places can be easily identified by GeoTags and then shown on maps. All of this is covered thoroughly.

There's a substantial section on dealing with RAW pictures and editing and saving them as 16 Bit TIFF files. This leads on to creating slideshows of your pictures and adding music to them from iTunes. There's even a brief section on creating them using iMovie (which comes included on the DVD).

For the Facebook and Flickr users there's a chapter on linking and uploading to both these services. Printing is an obvious feature that is still important to many users, and this chapter covers printing to conventional inkjet printers, and using Apple's online services that are accessible through iPhoto, such as printing yearbooks, calendars and the like.

The final chapter covers troubleshooting and offers quite a few trips for specific problems and includes yet another tip that I was unaware of! (Command-Option while clicking on the iPhoto Dock icon forces iPhoto to offer various options to rebuild the library.)

There are two appendices at the very end of the book, one a Deep Background of digital photo issues such as resolution, aspect ratios and the like, and one on taking better photo's.

There are links to various other resources scattered through the book and they are all encoded as proper hyperlinks that work within Acrobat.

Overall I really like this book. Adam is very thorough in his coverage and appears to cover everything in iPhoto 09. His language is thorough yet readily understandable. A wry sense of humor is evident from occasional remarks but this book is nothing like the `... for Dummies' guides which tend to be written down to a low level. At $15 for a PDF version of the book it's tremendous value. You'll learn to use iPhoto well and a learn a few power tricks that will make your life easier and amaze your friends.

The easy way to learn iPhoto 09 - 2009-06-11
Reviewer Rating:
The Visual QuickStart series generally does a good job of providing easy-to-use manuals for programs. iPhoto 09 is no exception. The book is a sort of cookbook. Tasks are presented one per page, or on two facing pages. Steps are covered sequentially, with screen shots illustrating the process. You could consider it a sort of cookbook for iPhoto 09.

It works. Adam Engst's explanations are clear. Basics are presented first - with more advanced topics added later. The book is inexpensive for a computer manual. It's even available in Kindle format and as a PDF from the takecontrolbooks website. I have the PDF and find it an excellent manual that I always have with me.

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