My Mom's Guide to Using iPhoto 2 A step-by-step guide to the everyday features of iPhoto.

Where this booklet came from.

My Mom didn't write this booklet. I wrote it for my Mom. And my Dad too.

Last summer my Mom bought her first computer. A graphite iMac. Running OS X.

I helped her set it up. I showed her how to play a few games, how to use the web browser, and how to do email.

As I would explain things to her she would scribble down notes on scraps of paper. Eventually she had a file folder of various sized scraps that she would refer to later.

For Christmas my Dad bought her a digital camera. I can't remember ever seeing my Mom take snapshots, but from the moment she opened her new digital camera she was snapping away. Mostly of her grandchildren, but also of her cat, and the tree, and the snow, and, oh yeah, ocassionally of us, her sons and daughters.

I introduced her to iPhoto, so she could save and display her pictures, and she started to add to her pile of notes on how to do all the everyday things: importing photos, navigating through them, emailing them, putting them in albums. Things like that.

But it finally occured to me that there was a better way for her to learn and remember this stuff than through a pile of notes on scraps of paper. So I started to write down explanations of all the most common iPhoto features, with a step-by-step description of how to do it.

One page for each different task. Keep it simple, keep it clear.

The result is this booklet, and I'm now telling you about it because I think that this information will be useful to more than just my Mom.

I think it will be useful to other people's Moms... and Dads. And I'm thinking that it will be helpful to just about anyone who is new to iPhoto and wants to learn how to do the everyday things, without having to wade through a 200 page book.

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I'm not a professional photographer, but I do take alot of of digital pics for websites I'm working on, and for my own enjoyment.

When iPhoto first came out, long before my Mom got her camera, I gave the program a look-see. And I have to confess, that on the basis of that first look, I thought it was not right for me. I thought that I needed a more powerful picture editor for my work, and I feared that iPhoto would not protect my originals for me.

I was wrong.

When my Mom's digital camera led me to take another look at iPhoto I discovered that it actually does a very good job at the things I need to do most with photos in my work. Things like rotating, cropping and scaling photos. I also discovered that it even does a good job at protecting my originals even after I've started editing them in iPhoto.

So I think that iPhoto, and this Guide, can also be useful to the amateur digital photographer who wants to organize and preserve their photos, and sometimes needs to enhance them before sharing with others.

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So here it is: "My Mom's Guide to Using iPhoto 2". I hope it is useful. If it is, please let me know. I'm already working on the same thing for iTunes.

Copyright 2003 by Jack Hodgson userguides@da4.com

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