Posted Friday, March 11, 2005

Export those iPhoto 5 Slide Shows Faster (and Yeah, that's a Bug)

Forrest Corbett is bummed. Over at Macintouch, he complains that "On my PowerBook G4 500, a slideshow of 150 800x600 images takes nearly an hour to export. In iPhoto 3, it only took a few minutes."

Setting aside the fact that there was no iPhoto 3, we can help Forrest through the trees. The problem deals with the exact same topic I addressed a while ago: the two different flavors of iPhoto slide show.

When you want to create fancy -- cinematic, Apple calls it -- slide show, use the Slideshow button at the bottom of the iPhoto window. But note that exporting this kind of slide show takes more time, since your Mac must render a lot of video frames.

When you want to create and export a basic slide show -- with no custom Ken Burns moves and with the same transition and duration between each shots -- don't use the Slideshow button. Instead, simply toss your photos into an album, then saunter up to the Share menu and choose Export.

This lets you export the photos using the techniques that earlier iPhoto versions provided.

Forrest goes on: "Setting the slideshow to be the same length as the music, sometimes results in one photo being drawn out for a matter of minutes while the rest are just a few seconds."

That's a bug. In iPhoto 5.0.1, the "fit slideshow to music" option doesn't work. It's that simple. Hopefully we'll see an update that addresses this.

That fresh-baked book smell. It ships to the printer next week: the newest, biggest edition of the original digital hub book and its companion instructional DVD (now over 2.5 hours, with 45 minutes on iPhoto 5 alone). And Amazon is still offering a whopping 34 percent discount. Pre-order The Macintosh iLife '05 for $21.