Been awhile since I posted anything...iPhoto review

It has been awhile since I posted anything.  Work has been hectic but we managed to sneak down to Disney World for a few days earlier in the month.  That was a fast but fun trip!  We bought into the Disney Vacation Club this past summer and all of our points were burning a hole in my pocket!

The big thing I am working on at the moment is a family photo book using iPhoto on my Mac.  It is actually a pretty fast process to populate all of the photos but adding all of the text is a bit of a drag.  After almost twenty years of researching, I am finally trying to put some of what I have found into a published format.  The book pertains to the ancestors of my father's parents, the Letts and Lawsons of Mecklenburg County, Virginia.  I am only going to offer the book to descendants of my grandparents as it is somewhat personal in nature.  When I am done, it will be a nice product...hard-bound and in full color.  I think it will have upward of 200 photos included, dating back to the 1850s.

iPhoto is a pretty neat program.  I am using the built-in templates, placing the photos myself.  You can however simply select an album in iPhoto and it will create the book for you.  See the example below.  In this case I selected the album from our recent Disney World trip and, although I did not actually create the book, you can see the preview of what it would look like.  You can select different styles and it even tells you the approximate price in the bottom, left corner.

Here are a few examples of what I have put together for my family book.  The first example shows photos of my father and his siblings, pieced together in a collage of sorts.  The second example shows a photo of my great-grandparents.  The photo is enlarged to cover the entire page, a half-spread if you will.  It also includes a written history about their family and a detail blurb about the photo.  (Don't pay much attention to any words that you see, I have not proofed anything on the pages.  I have just been trying to fill the space).

When I finish with the book, I think it is going to be about sixty pages and will be quite expensive.  I hope to not price my cousins out of buying one but it will be too expensive for me to give them away.  At any rate, iPhoto is a pretty neat tool.  I find it very neat to play with and extremely powerful in general.

Family Tree Maker 2010 For Mac is Available for Pre-Order

I thought I would mention that Family Tree Maker 2010 is now available for the Mac.  This is the first version they have tried for the Mac, at least in recent memory, so this is a big deal.  I bought a Mac about a month ago and installed Parallels and Windows.  I have therefore been able to use Family Tree Maker on my Mac, for the past month, without buying a Mac version.  The only hold-up I would have with FTM for Mac, would be the compatibility between the files it produces and those the windows version uses.  For example, I open my FTM file at home, on my Mac, and at work on my PC.  If I had the Mac-only version at home, I would probably not be able to easily open the file on my PC at work.  If you only use Mac, the new version would probably be perfect for you.

The best thing, is that if you order now, they will give my readers 20% off if you click the above photo/ad.  Let me know if you buy it and what you think of the program in general.  It looks a lot like the Windows version but my guess is that a Mac version of the program will put Ancestry a step closer to making an iPhone app where you can interact with your Mac, syncing data like Reunion does.