Make your images last Page 3 of 3

Don’t let your photos go up in smoke—develop a backup strategy now

by Joe Kissell, Macworld.com

Keeping a catalog

If you have thousands of photos archived onto a stack of DVDs, finding the one you’re looking for can be difficult. You can create a basic catalog of archived photos with iPhoto, and even make contact sheets (printed pages of thumbnails). The key components: thumbnails, file names, descriptions, and the locations of the original files. iPhoto’s Export Web Page feature can provide all four:

Step 1 Select the photos that you want to store.

Step 2 Choose Share: Export, and click on the Web Page tab in the Export Photos dialog box.

Step 3 Enter a descriptive title for your catalog (the title should match whatever you write on the CD or DVD).

Step 4 Enter the number of columns and rows you want. For a catalog, fairly small, low-resolution images are generally adequate—for example, a 6-column layout with a maximum image width of 100 pixels. To make your catalog easy to search, choose a large number for the Rows field (such as 999); this will force all the images onto a single page (see “Not Just for Web Pages”).

Step 5 In the Thumbnail section, specify a maximum width in pixels (try 100 pixels as a starting point); iPhoto automatically calculates the maximum height. Be sure to select the Show Title and Show Comment options.

Step 6 Click on Export, and choose a destination for the files. iPhoto will create a folder with the title you entered.

Step 7 After the export process has finished, open the newly created folder in the Finder and double-click on the HTML file with the same name as the folder. The page of thumbnails will open in your default browser. Because all the photos are on one (perhaps very long) page, you can use your browser’s Find command to quickly locate file names or comments. You can also print the catalog from your browser (or save it as a PDF file) to make a contact sheet. (Although iPhoto can print contact sheets directly, these sheets don’t include titles or comments.) When printing, most browsers split images onto multiple pages if they happen to fall at a page boundary. To work around this, open the HTML file in Microsoft Word or another word processor and print from there instead.

Step 8 After verifying that all your thumbnails exported correctly, you can then delete the descriptive title -Images and descriptive title -Pages in the main catalog folder to save space.

Step 9 You can now return to iPhoto, burn a disc with the photos you previously selected, and then delete them from iPhoto.

By choosing set-tings such as these in iPhoto’s Export Photos dialog box, you can create a catalog of archived photos as a Web page.

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