Mark Torrance.com

Recently when my wife Leslie asked me to finally start printing out some of the many digital photos we've been taking, I searched around for some options. I tried out a program called PhotoPrinto which appears to work reasonably well, but I found the image manipulation tools to be somewhat slow (not as responsive as I'm used to in other Mac applications).

Then I remembered Pages. Pages is part of iWork, a fairly new app from Apple which is positioned as a lightweight word processor for "design-oriented" documents such as family newsletters, flyers, and the like. Interestingly, it offers drag-and-drop support for photos, so you can start with a template that includes a few styled photos, and then drag-drop from iPhoto or any file on disk to replace the photos with new ones. The styles automatically resize to apply to the aspect ratio of the new photo, preserving the longer of the 2 dimensions.

None of the preset templates really worked for our purposes, but I created a new template consisting of 6 different page layouts, each with a mix of sizes of photos. I chose one for the "first page", and left that in existence in the template, while I used "capture pages" to turn each of the others into a Page template as part of my overall "photo album" template.

I then saved this out to /Library/Application Support/iWork/Pages/Templates/My Templates/ within my home dir, and copied the same to Leslie's mac. After a bit of training and explanation, she was using the pages from this template to create photo album sheets like a pro.

We even found we could browse the web for a site that sold scrapbook background papers, drag a large-sized GIF sample of the paper onto our Pages template, "send to back", then resize it to fill the page behind our photos. After turning down the opacity of that layer, this worked surprisingly well, especially when we print the results as borderless 8.5x11 onto glossy paper, then insert them into plastic sleeves with 3-hole external margins.

I haven't worked it out, but I suspect the cost per page of the Apple books is lower, and the quality just as high, as when I print myself using my expensive Canon i9900 ink + glossy photo paper. But the convenience of being able to design and print at home, with a totally unspecified page layout, is worth the price to me.

If you'd like to try my template, you can click here to download it (533k .tgz), then run "tar xzf photo-album.tgz" from your command line to extract it, and put it into /Users/yourname/Library/Application Support/iWork/Pages/Templates/My Templates/

If you try it, drop me a note to let me know how it works for you: mark@marktorrance.com