9.4. Phase 4: Edit the Titles and Captions

Depending on the theme and page-layout template you've chosen, iPhoto may offer you any of several kinds of text boxes that you can fill with titles, explanations, and captions by typing or pasting (Figure 9-11):

• The book title. This box appears on the book's cover. If it's a hardbound book, it's actually foil-stamped into the cover material; it also appears on the dust jacket.

  When you first create a book, iPhoto proposes the album's name as the book name, but you're welcome to change it.

  A second text box, set with slightly smaller type formatting, appears below the title. Use it for a subtitle: the date, "A Trip Down Memory Lane," "Happy Birthday Aunt Enid," "A Little Something for the Insurance Company," or whatever.

  Figure 9-11. In iPhoto '09, few themes let you type up captions for individual photos. Instead, you get caption boxes for entire pages.
  Text boxes also appear on the inside dust-jacket flap (shown here), on Introduction and About pages, and so on. Thanks to the Fonts panel (also shown here), you have a full arsenal of typographic controls.

  

• The dust jacket. If you order a hardbound book, you've got that glossy dust jacket to consider. You can type up marketing blather or other descriptive material to appear on the inside front cover flap, just like on a book at Barnes & Noble. You're also allowed a couple of lines of text on the back cover, which might be the same as the title and subtitle but doesn't have to be.

• Introduction, Chapter. Applying the Introduction or Chapter page design to a page produces a huge text block that you can fill with any introductory text you think the book needs. The Layout pop-up menu usually offers you a choice of text-block designs—one or two columns, for example.

• Captions. Apple really, really does not want you adding a caption to each photo. Every theme lets you caption an entire page (see Figure 9-11), but only the Folio theme lets you caption each photo—and it limits you to two photos per page, max.

• Text Page, About, Contact. The Folio theme, intended as a showcase for photographers to display their best work, offers three additional text-page options. Text Page is just a striking, simple, title-plus-text-block affair that lets you describe the book, chapter, or photo grouping. About is the same thing, but it offers one big title and one subtitle in addition to the text block. Finally, Contact is filled with places to list your phone number, Web site, email address, and so on—along with the contact info for your agent.