Murphy Mac

Your Mac has seamless integration between its many applications. For example, you can drag an image from iPhoto to the Mail application in your Dock to attach the image to a new message.

But not everyone uses Mail. If you happen to use Gmail - and iPhoto - you might find the iPhoto2Gmail plug-in quite useful. Once installed the plug-in adds a tab to the Export panel in iPhoto. From there you can specify recipients with the integrated Gmail contacts lookup feature. You can even fill in fields to compose your email message.

The plug-in supports resizing your images to dimensions suitable for email. Murphy knows tons of people who need this! You can also elect to send the original image file if a shrunken jpeg isn’t what your recipient requires.

Of course you could go to Gmail and attach files one by one, browsing to a Finder folder where you exported resized photos. But iPhoto2Gmail lets you select multiple images in iPhoto, where images are meant to be viewed. Then it fires off an email without you having to dig around in Finder. That’s definitely worth something.

A fresh version was just released on Sunday. While the rest of you were doing your taxes Juan was squashing bugs and enhancing funtionality. Actually, Murphy might have more readers in the EU than the states, so maybe we should scratch that.

If you didn’t check Murphy out over the weekend back up a little and see the post about MiniDV tapes. And some other things too. Or click below to see a screencast of iPhoto2Gmail in action.

iPhoto has a lot of stuff packed inside. Book makers, slideshows, greeting cards, special effects - it’s easy to get distracted when you’re trying to clean house and delete some photos. That’s where Automator comes in.

Just add three actions to a workflow - you’ll find them all under iPhoto in Automator:

1. Ask for Photos
2. Review Photos
3. New iPhoto Album

You’ll probably want the last one to prompt you for a name, so check the option to “Show Action When Run”.

Save the workflow as an application. When you run it you’ll see the same mini-browser we saw in a post last week. But you’ll also get a handy panel asking you to approve or reject each image. Make your choices, and an album will fill with your rejects. You could reverse the process and have Automator do something with the Approved images, like adding them to a Finder folder.

Confused? See it all in a screencast.

Once you’ve isolated your rejects in an album you can remove the files from your disk. Here’s more information on deleting from iPhoto.

Using a single Automator action you can pop open a mini iPhoto browser that lists your library, albums and images. You get quick access to your photos without fully opening iPhoto.

The action is designed to kick off workflows, letting you select the photos other actions will act upon. So the Workflow is active while the window is open.
You could add other actions to the Workflow, but you don’t have to. It was demonstrated on an episode of MacBreak Weekly with a second action to open the selected photos in Preview if you clicked Choose instead of Cancel.

You can open the browser a number of ways. To make it highly accessible you might want to assign a function key to it. You can do that with Xkeys, a freeware application Murphy uses in the screencast.

While playing with Automator you might notice an iPhoto action for reviewing photos. It facilitates simply accepting or rejecting photos, and passing them on to another action. You could dump all the rejects to an album for example. Sure, you could do this in iPhoto with other tools. But this action keeps you on task if you’re easily distracted! Maybe we’ll screencast that another day.

iPhoto books look great in print. But you can share your book as a movie too.

An apparently undocumented feature facilitates exporting straight to a Quicktime movie from your iPhoto book. Just hold the Option key when you click the Play button within your book. You’ll see the same panel you see for a regular book slideshow, but when you click Play within the panel you’ll be prompted to save the show as a movie.

Murphy discovered this while reading an article at Macworld and watching a YouTube video that explained how to send your book to iDVD in order to produce a movie. Great tip - but the process didn’t seem very Mac-like, so Murph tried the Option key. And….it worked.

So the capability has always been there, but now there’s a more direct way to do it. You don’t have to open iDVD, or close it, or delete a useless iDVD project. Don’t know what we’re talking about? There’s a screencast, click Watch Now below.

This must be what it feels like to discover a new galaxy or something.

Can you sleep at night? Knowing there might be photos in your iPhoto library that haven’t been assigned to any Album at all? How will your family and friends ever see those orphaned shots? They won’t be included when you make the kids watch slideshow after slideshow on your Apple TV.

Murphy remembers the old days - when he had to run an Applescript to find such photos. You won’t have to go to such lengths. Smart Albums can handle this ask for you. Click Watch Now to see the screencast. Or click to see another useful way Murphy uses Smart Albums.
Do you have iPhoto questions for Murphy? Let him know in the comments. Or send him an email.