In our last installment [0], we showed how the Picasa software from Google can be a huge help in managing your family photos and sharing them with TribalPages. We're huge fans of Picasa, and for the Windows platform, there really aren't many free competitors. However, for users of the Apple Mac platform, things are a bit different.

Modern Macs come with a set of great tools called iLife that help with all kinds of creative endeavors: iTunes for music, iMovie for creating home movies, and, most importantly for us, iPhoto for managing all of your photos. This great application provides the same type of photo manipulation and organization that we saw with Picasa, with the added benefit of already being installed and ready to go on every Mac out there.

In this part of the tutorial, we're going to show how to use iPhoto and our new Email Tool to send all of your family history photos to your TribalPages site.

Getting Started with iPhoto

The first thing we need to do is start up the iPhoto application. This is fairly straightforward: you simply click on the iPhoto icon in the bottom launch bar on your Mac desktop. (The icon looks like a camera with a picture of a sunset behind it and pops up the title "iPhoto" when your mouse passes over it.)

Once started, you'll see the main iPhoto screen with a list of folders and albums on the left, and a preview screen with thumbnails of your photos on the right.

Getting Professional Help (from Apple!)

One of the best things about Apple is the wonderful way they support their applications. In fact, we're not going to spend any time at all in explaining how to add your pictures to iPhoto, how to organize them into folders, etc. We don't have to!

Apple has a wonderful iPhoto tutorial [1] that walks you through every feature of iPhoto, from importing from your digital camera to cropping them appropriately, all the way to creating screensavers and calendars.

[2]
Simply click on the photo to the left to get a great walk-through with videos and step-by-step instructions that are far beyond what we can provide you.

If you want more details about emailing photos (which is very important to us, obviously), you might want to look at the Email [3] section directly.

Adding Photos to your TribalPages Site

Once you have a basic understanding of iPhoto (like Picasa, it's a lot of fun!), we can start using this great tool to bulk upload to your TribalPages family tree site.

First, we need to bring up the photo browsing window in iPhoto and select the photos we want to send to our site. In the example shown below, we have three photos in an album named "Tribal Test", and we are selecting them by dragging the selection box over them. (You can also select multiple photos by holding the "command" key while clicking.)

Once selected, click on the Email icon at the bottom of the iPhoto screen. It looks like a stamp, as you can see in the image to the right. This will start the email process, which is simple and fast.

Using Your Email Upload Address to Bulk Upload

We'll assume that you've already setup your Email Upload PIN and that you have your upload address. (If you haven't, read Part 1 of this series [3] for details on how to get that working!) In our example, we'll be using the email upload address binkofree-1234@tribalpages.com, which I would get on my test account if I set my PIN to 1234.

As the iPhoto Email process starts, it asks you what size photo you'd like to send. In our case we choose "Medium", but you can choose whatever site fits your needs. Our software will shrink the photos to fit the maximum size your plan allows (800x800 for free sites and 1600x1600 for paid sites) when we receive the pictures.

When you've made your choice, simply click "Compose" to create the email message to TribalPages. (Note that we've left the two check boxes about titles and comments blank - this is recommended)

The iPhoto application will now compose a message with your photos attached and let you specify the recipient, subject, and message. To send to your TribalPages site, you need to send the email to your email upload address, so that should go in the "TO:" field. The "Subject:" field will be used for a caption on all of the photos, and any text in the body of the message will be used for the description.

In the image to the right, notice that we've put binkofree-1234@tribalpages.com as the recipient and some basic text in the Subject and message body areas.

Checking the Results

Once that mail is sent, it may take a few minutes to make it to the TribalPages servers. When it does, our system will check it for errors (and for a correct PIN), add the photos to an album named "Emailed Photos" on your site, and send a response to the sender. If the sender is not the owner of the site, then the owner will be notified also.

As we look at our example, we'll see that under the Photos section of our site, there is now an album named "Emailed Photos" that has our three photos in it. (If this album didn't exist before this was sent, it will be created when photos are recieved.) Like all photos on TribalPages, we can edit this pictures, attach them to our family members, etc.

Next Up...We Take to the Stars!

We hope you've had fun using Picasa and iPhoto to get a handle on your photo collections and share your family pictures on your TribalPages family tree website. However, management is fairly boring, so our next installment will do something completely different: add Satellite and Aerial photos to your website in seconds using Google Earth! (You won't believe how easy this is!)

We hope you're getting a lot out of this set of tutorials. Make sure you let us know on the Technical Forum if you've spotted any problems, or if you have any suggestions. For this article, we got some great feedback from our Mac users, which was a huge help -- thanks! We'll post our next installment in about a week.

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