Making a Slideshow with iPhoto

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pixel_a_ted - 24 May 2008 04:14 GMT

I am running iPhoto 6 on a G5 (OS 10.4.11). I have about a dozen
photos in an album and my wife would like to send them to some friends
and family in the form of a slideshow with music. The photos are
roughly 2000 pixels in max dimension and they have been "saved for
web" in Photoshop to a size of approximately 600 KB each. They look
very good in iPhoto.

First I tried to use File/Export and save the slides with music as a
QT (.mov) file. I tried various values for the pixel dimension
options. In all cases, the resulting file was poor - obviously heavily
compressed.

Then I created a slideshow in iPhoto. Again, the photos looked very
good enlarged when the slideshow played in iPhoto. When I went to
export it, the best option was 640 x 480, which is very small and does
not do justice to the photos.

Is there a better/easier way to get a decent slideshow? I am not
proficient in iMovie, although from my brief searching on this issue
it appears that there might be too much compression there also.

Thanks.

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Link - 24 May 2008 06:55 GMT

> I am running iPhoto 6 on a G5 (OS 10.4.11). I have about a dozen
> photos in an album and my wife would like to send them to some friends
[quoted text clipped - 18 lines]
>
> Thanks.

If you're planning on showing the slideshow primarily on a computer,
just keep it in iPhoto and play in in there. If you're going to be
burning it to a DVD (say, in iDVD), 640x480 is decent for playback on
an SD TV.

Exporting into an encoded movie does compress the images. This is
generally because movies are viewed on things like a SD TV, which only
have a resolution of about 1024x768. Things are changing with the
availability of HD TVs. If you want to get a higher resolution, check
in iMovie, especially iMovie '08 (it's more geared towards producing HD
videos).

HTH

-L

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pixel_a_ted - 24 May 2008 12:38 GMT

> If you're planning on showing the slideshow primarily on a computer,
> just keep it in iPhoto and play in in there.

Unfortunately, most of the people who would receive the slideshow
aren't on Macs.

> Exporting into an encoded movie does compress the images. This is
> generally because movies are viewed on things like a SD TV, which only
> have a resolution of about 1024x768.

Even if I choose a good size for the QT movie, the picture is so
compressed that the quality is very low.

Thanks.

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Link - 24 May 2008 15:15 GMT

> Even if I choose a good size for the QT movie, the picture is so
> compressed that the quality is very low.

It appears that way when you view it on your computer (which has a
resolution much higher than the resulting encoded movie. When viewed
on a TV, it should look better.

Signature

-L

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Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / May 2008

Making a Slideshow with iPhoto