iPhoto and Rapidweaver

For those looking beyond Apple's iWeb to share photos from iPhoto on the web, create and maintain family or small business websites, you may want to consider an Mac only application called Rapidweaver from the folks at Real Mac Software. I've been using Rapidweaver for several years, and it has matured exceptional well. The application has developed a large following and has a very giving community that shares user tips, techniques and tools to enhance the web developers experience. The application has built-in access to your iPhoto Library, so creating a quick website of the family get together, the grandkids visit or your last vacation is almost as easy as creating a photo gallery from iWeb. There are a few more screens to sequence through and lots more options on how you can present your images, including presenting your photos in a flash gallery. In the Rapidweaver world, templates like those in iWeb are called "themes". There are a few dozen "themes" that come with Rapidweaver, but the neat thing is there are dozens of Rapidweaver "theme" developers that create new themes to work with Rapidweaver. They have created some pretty amazing themes, too. Some are free, some they charge for. Typically the range in price from $5 - 20, depending on the developer. Most themes have an endless amount of control on how you want to present your web pages. You can adjust the type of fonts used, banner images, backgrounds, width and height of the pages, all colors of the fonts, navigation buttons, etc. Also, most themes are designed to render properly for PC users that still using Internet Explorer 6 as their default web browser. iWeb still has problems with IE6 and many pages will not render or appear as you'd like when published to the web. Sometimes, I will publish a webpage in iWeb, then publish the same page using Rapidweaver, so the family members that are still using IE6 can see the photos or videos that I'm sharing. Yes, it's more work, but it's fun. Take a look at Rapidweaver, you may like what you see.

Find iPhoto Duplicates With Magic

Our friends over at Brattoo Propaganda Software have been very busy. They have updated their popular iPhoto companion application Duplicate Annihilator. This time, they have added a new feature called "Magic Modes".

What is Magic Mode? These presets searches that do all the "magic" of selecting detection algorithms and matches your selection. Magic mode takes the hassle and time from you having to manually create the presets yourself. Magic Mode then analyzes your images and through the "magic" of Brattoo's amazing software, gives you maximum results in finding the duplicates in your iPhoto Library

iPhoto to Snapfish

The folks at HP have created a iPhoto plugin that will allow you to export to their Snapfish photo service directly from within iPhoto LINK. If you use Snapfish and iPhoto, you may want to give this a try. If you don't know what Snapfish is, you won't want to find out. Yuk!

Update for iPhoto '09

A minor update to iPhoto '09 just in time to get those summer travel and vacation photos published in their new Hardcover 13" X 10" photo book. It comes with a dust jacket and satin finish on the wrap cover. Kind of a "coffee-table" edition. They have also updated the themes for travel books and holiday cards.

Flickr Export Update

FlickrExport is a plugin for iPhoto which provides a direct export interface to Flickr. A new version has been released LINK