iPhoto, Web Galleries and .Mac albums

[Hopstretch]

Hi all. I've been playing around with moving our family website over to .Mac and while the integration with iPhoto is quite handy in many respects, there are a couple of things that have me pulling my hair out one strand at a time.

1) Web Galleries. Sweet, but iPhoto will apparently NOT let you publish full-resolution pictures to your gallery. While image dimensions are reported correctly, the image file itself is compressed by about two thirds. I can find no way to change this behavior. Fair enough, resolutions above 800x600 won't actually show up at any higher quality in the Gallery browser, but you still might want to have uncompressed images available for your friends to download and print, right? If so, you have to clunkily work around -- sending them directly, and one-by-one, through the gallery's upload button or by using the email publishing feature.

Aaargh!

2) iWeb albums. Same issues. Here, there is a manual setting in the Photo Inspector that you can set to allow original quality downloads from albums. But this doesn't seem to affect iPhoto's upload behavior. Again, simply dragging pictures from iPhoto into an album seems to apply the same compression scheme that applies to Web Galleries. So, again, you have to work around, say by copying your full-size image files straight to the appropriate iDisk folders.

Double aaarrgh!

Does this "feature" annoy anyone else? Am I missing some obvious way to turn it off?

 

[Hopstretch]

Slight revision of above complaint: You can upload an entire folder of full-size image files to a Web Gallery all at once by using the gallery's upload button. Better, but I still don't think we should have to work around iPhoto to do this.

 

[daemontrader]

I found the bigger issue with the web gallery, at least for me, was the fact that it doesn't really handle a large number of photos well. I like to keep all of my photos online and found the main gallery page slowed to a crawl around 40 or 50 albums.

This wouldn't be so bad I think if you could turn off the "skimming" feature since it seems that the page waits to display until all these images are loaded before rendering. I am playing with SmugMug at the moment since it has a nice iPhoto plug-in.

If you happen to sign up to SmugMug save us both some money and use this code:
DDJEsSg7FObS6

 

[Hopstretch]

This wouldn't be so bad I think if you could turn off the "skimming" feature since it seems that the page waits to display until all these images are loaded before rendering.

You can turn off the skimming feature. Select all your albums in iWeb and the Media Index will pop up. Select "None" from among the the "Album Animation" dropdown options.

 

[sananda]

same for me. i can't send photos from iphoto to the web gallery without them being severely reduced in size. the upload from browser doesn't work at all. the upload by email works and at full resolution.

and i can't skim the web gallery album without first opening then closing the album. at least not with safari 2.0.4. it works with firefox.

anyway, i have tried applecare and they don't know what to do and no-one on the apple discussion pages knows either.

someone from apple is calling me tomorrow to go through these issues.

 

[askywalker]

someone from apple is calling me tomorrow to go through these issues.

Good luck with this, and please share your results. I am also very interested in this thread - as my main purpose in sharing my photos is for people to download and print them.

 

[lawcomic]

Sorry for the cross-post here....but...

I want to set up my .mac web gallery so some albums are accessible by specific people. Some, for example, I only want friends to access. Some family. Some friends and family.

It appears to me that you can only have one user and password per album.

Am I right about this, or am I missing something?

 

[sananda]

Good luck with this, and please share your results. I am also very interested in this thread - as my main purpose in sharing my photos is for people to download and print them.

i was hoping to be able to give an update by now but the apple person who was supposed to be calling me got stuck in meetings and then his iphone battery died so he couldn't call me. he should call me tomorrow.

 

[Hopstretch]

i was hoping to be able to give an update by now but the apple person who was supposed to be calling me got stuck in meetings and then his iphone battery died so he couldn't call me.

You know, if I was from Apple, I wouldn't use that particular excuse.

Seriously, though, please let us know what they tell you. I've sent them feedback, and encouraged others to do the same, but that channel is pretty much one way traffic.

 

[sananda]

i just received a call from apple (on a rather crackly iphone line!). i went through all the problems i have found with iphoto and the web galleries (and also iweb and garageband). he asked me to send him the system profiles for our macs and he will look into it.

i'll let everyone know what he says when he gets back to me.

 

[sananda]

i've just installed the update. my test images of around 2.6 MB are (when loaded afresh) appearing 1.1 MB.

so that's much better!

 

[askywalker]

i've just installed the update. my test images of around 2.6 MB are (when loaded afresh) appearing 1.1 MB.

so that's much better!

I installed the update and did some tests. A 3.2 MB photo (original) gets shrunk to be 484 Kb when downloaded using the single image download.

Looks like I am going to have to revert to Picasa Gallery (or Flickr) until they get this worked out. I have 10 Gigs of space that I pay for, so there is no excuse to not upload the original size.

 

[sananda]

I installed the update and did some tests. A 3.2 MB photo (original) gets shrunk to be 484 Kb when downloaded using the single image download.

Looks like I am going to have to revert to Picasa Gallery (or Flickr) until they get this worked out. I have 10 Gigs of space that I pay for, so there is no excuse to not upload the original size.

as you say, we pay for 10 gigs of space so why can't we upload at the size we want until our space is full since the promise on the web gallery page on the apple website is "visitors to your Web Gallery can download high-resolution copies of their favorite photos, or entire albums in a single Zip file. Your photos download in large format, suitable for printing at up to 16 by 20 inches." they shouldn't promise something that isn't in fact the case as .mac support tell me "iPhoto does downsample images during the uploading process. This behavior is expected and consistent with how iPhoto and other iLife applications present objects on the web.

Images are downsized so that they are easier to access for a broader range of connection methods. Additionally, downsizing is necessary to prevent the uploading of unusable large images, such as high pixel photographs and multi-layer images. Downsizes is designed to strike a balance between usability and accessibility for users".

bizarrely, visitors to our web galleries can upload at full resolution via their browsers or email.

so i guess we have to upload via our browsers to achieve the result we want.

i have suggested that it doesn't make sense for us to have to work around the issue like this. i have been speaking not only to .mac support but have been referred to someone in market development who is looking into the matter.

 

[Kan-O-Z]

Please let us know if anyone has found a way to publish full size pictures on the web from iphoto. This would be a great feature!

Kan-O-Z

 

[Cloudane]

If anyone has found an answer to this yet, and also a way for the gallery images to be at 1024x768 rather than 800x600, let me know.

I do a lot of landscape photography, and right now the .Mac web gallery is pretty much useless... the photos just don't look right when all the detail is lost to high compression and low resolutions.

I was half tempted to buy a .Mac subscription for its various other benefits too, but this is a bit of a deal breaker so far.

 

[askywalker]

I was half tempted to buy a .Mac subscription for its various other benefits too, but this is a bit of a deal breaker so far.

I kinda regret the .mac subscription. iDisk has been pretty bad performance wise and has some strange quirks. This iPhoto gallery thing has had me switch back to Picasa and Flickr. At this rate I certainly won't be renewing.

 

[sananda]

iDisk has been pretty bad performance wise and has some strange quirks.

i tried using this for the first time last night. i thought i would back up some photos to idisk since i have 20GB unused. i gave up after it took four hours to transfer a 100MB folder. seems pretty useless to me.