Make an Electronic Photo Album

What to do with those pictures? Make a photo album!

This Christmas, after the presents and family gatherings are over, it will be time to download or scan your images to your Mac. There, in a folder on the desktop, the pictures are waiting to be put into an album. There are many products that can do that for you - let's look at two of them: iViewMultimedia Bundle Edition and AppleWorks.

iView Multimedia Bundle Edition 1.0 is a product that came bundled with Toast Titanium 5.02, found in the Roxio Photo folder. The old bundled version is no longer supported or distributed by iView, but the Pro edition is just $30.

AppleWorks 6.x is a also a program that comes bundled with a purchased product, in this case the iMac and iBook.

The two applications have similar features useful in creating a web page, as shown in the table below:

Web page creation with the iView Multimedia Bundle is pretty straightforward: open up iView and drag the folder holding the images onto the iView window. iView then indexes the graphic files and lets you view the images in the info window, showing file name, size, file type, and picture dimensions. Other windows you can view are thumbnails and media window, enable viewing one picture at a time.

To create a Web layout go to the menu bar, choose Export, select HTML gallery, and iView automatically creates a gallery! On the first page, a display of pictures in the gallery is laid out, and a gallery of sorts is achieved by iView displaying pictures on individual Web pages. These individual pages can be reached by clicking on the image on the gallery page; return to the main page can be done by clicking on the double arrows at the top of the individual page. The next and or previous picture page can be reached by clicking on the arrows at the top, created automatically by iView.

Web page creation is a neat and fun experience. The iView interface is easy to use. Text can be added to each page, though it is very helpful if you know HTML.

Web page creation can be done in AppleWorks with finesse. After you create a new word processing page, layout is essentially drag and drop; that is you must manually layout the pictures on the page. It is up to you to create any additional pages required to hold all of your pictures or a gallery that can be easily navigated. Layout with captions can be done easily; after all, the layout is done on a word processing page. HTML experience is a definite plus here.

Bottom line is to look through all of the folders in the software files that came bundled with your CD burner, camera, and scanner. You may find very useful software. However, AppleWorks 6.x (and 5.x, too) are workhorses with some finesse can create pages suitable for displaying those Christmas pictures.

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