The first step in creating a book is selecting the pictures you want to include, which is probably the most challenging part of the whole project. For the best results, pick only your best and brightest shots. This keeps the book engaging and helps keep the cost down.

Most of Photos’ built-in book themes let you place up to seven pictures per page, though some let you squeeze in up to 16. Keep in mind that the more pictures you put on a page, the smaller and less impactful they become—after all, how much of an impact can postage stamp-size art have? For the best results, alternate the number of pictures on each page and mix in some pages that contain one large image—or an image that’s spread across two pages—to make the design more visually pleasing.

To get started, try gathering 50–75 pictures and organizing them into an album (The Wide World of Albums). That way you can drag the thumbnails into the order you want them to appear in the book instead of leaving it to Photos. You can always rearrange them in the book itself, but corralling them into an album first lets you easily assess them by, say, triggering an instant slideshow (Creating Instant Slideshows) of the album’s contents.

If you want to base your project on multiple existing albums, activate the albums, press ⌘-N to create a new album that includes all of their contents, and then simply delete the pictures you don’t want to include in the book. (Remember, as Removing Files from an Album explains, deleting pictures from an album doesn’t delete them from your library.) Arrange the album so your best two shots are at the beginning and end, as Photos automatically uses those for the front and back covers, respectively. (If you forget, you can easily swap cover shots later.)

If you don’t want to go the album route, just use the methods described on Selecting and Hiding Files to select some pictures to start your project with. Either way, you can always add more pictures to your book project after creating it.

Once you’ve selected an album or some individual shots, you’re ready to create the book project. To do that, choose File→Create Book or click the + button in the toolbar and choose Book, as shown in Figure 9-1.

The next screen lets you pick a book format and size, and displays pricing info. You get a couple of square and horizontal size options for hardcover and softcover books. The hardcover option isn’t plain; your pictures are printed right on the cover itself (front and back). Hardcover books also come with a matching dust jacket and a semitransparent protective sleeve. Softcover books, on the other hand, sport a thick, glossy cover but don’t include a dust jacket or sleeve. As you might suspect, softcover books are cheaper than hardcovers: An 8 x 6 softcover book is just $10 for 20 pages, which makes it an extremely affordable personalized gift.

Figure 9-1. When you start a project from the + menu (circled), Photos reports how many pictures it’ll include at the top of the menu (here, that’s 75). If you’re viewing the contents of an album when you create the project, be careful that no individual thumbnails are selected, or else Photos will add only those pictures to your project.

Books have to be at least 20 pages long, but they can be longer than that. Peek beneath each book’s price to see the cost for each additional page; it ranges from $0.49 to $1.49 per page, depending on the book’s format.

To pick a format, click one of the Select buttons beneath the pricing info, and you then see the screen in Figure 9-2, which is where you pick a theme.

Figure 9-2. Here are some of Photos’ book themes. Each one displays your pictures slightly differently and uses a particular color scheme. When this screen appears, Photos goes online to see if Apple has added new themes. If it finds any, it adds them here and puts a cloud icon on the thumbnail’s lower right to indicate that it will download the theme if you pick it.

To choose a theme, either double-click one of the thumbnails or click a thumbnail, and then click Create Book in Photos’ toolbar. Either way, Photos creates the book project and plops your shots onto just enough pages to hold the number of pictures you picked in step 1. You see the layout screen shown in Figure 9-3, which shows thumbnails of all the pages in your book. This view doesn’t have an official name, but it’s helpful to think of it as All Pages view.

Figure 9-3. This view shows all the pages in your book as thumbnails and displays the book’s cost at the upper right. The buttons labeled here let you exit the project, add or remove pages, and access page layout and projects settings. Drag the Zoom slider rightward to increase the size of the page thumbnails.

Behind the scenes, Photos creates a saved project for your book that’s visible in Projects view and, if you turned it on, the sidebar (The Two Faces of Photos). Because the project is saved, you can exit it and return to it when you’ve got time. You can rename the project by clicking its existing name and typing something else, tuck it into a folder (Using Folders) for organizational purposes, and duplicate or delete it by Control-clicking its thumbnail and picking an option from the shortcut menu that appears.

Changing the Theme and Format

Once you get the first glimpse of your book, you may decide to swap themes or pick a different format. Changing either one can zap any customizations you’ve made to individual pages, so it’s best to nail down these options now. To change your book’s theme or format, click the Settings button labeled in Figure 9-3. In the menu that appears (Figure 9-4), click Change Theme to pick a different theme or Change Format & Size to select a different format. Either button takes you back to the screens you saw when you first started the project.

Figure 9-4. This menu also lets you specify the number of pages in your project (say, to keep the project below a certain cost), turn page numbering on or off, and remove the light-gray Apple logo that appears at the bottom of the last left-facing page in your book.

Note

If you decide to experiment with a different theme or format after you customize some pages, all your design work will be lost. To preserve your work, duplicate your project, and then change the theme of the duplicate instead of your original. To do that, in Projects view or the sidebar, Control-click the project’s icon and choose Duplicate. This maneuver saves you a ton of time should you decide you like the original theme after all.

Now you’re ready to begin the fun yet time-consuming process of customizing the individual pages in your book. Grab a beverage, get comfortable, and read on!

Once you settle on a theme and format, you can dig into customizing each page in your book. You can reorder the pages within the book, swap photos between pages, change a page’s layout, enter captions, specify a picture’s zoom level, apply a filter to a picture, and so on. Much of your initial customization will likely involve dragging pages and pictures around to get the placement you want. Then you can dig into fine-tuning each picture and adding captions.

Happily, Photos lets you do most of this stuff in All Pages view (Figure 9-3), which includes thumbnails of all the pages in the book. This view gives you an overview of your whole project. It’s great for placing pictures onto pages, moving them between pages, picking page layouts and border colors, and generally creating the overall look and feel of the book.

If you double-click a page thumbnail in All Pages view, you enter Single Page view, where you see the thumbnail of just one two-page spread. This view is handy for adjusting how each picture appears on the page, and it’s the only place you can edit text (titles and captions). To switch back to All Pages view, click the < at the top left of the window.

This section teaches you how to use both views to customize your book project.

Removing and Replacing Pictures

If you started your project by selecting a bunch of images, Photos places them onto your book pages in chronological order. If you started with an album, they appear in your custom sort instead. Either way, you’re not stuck with this arrangement. If you prefer to manually place pictures on each page, then at the bottom left of All Pages or Single page view, click Clear Placed Photos. When you do, Photos asks if you’re sure. If you click Continue, Photos replaces your images with generic gray placeholders, as Figure 9-5 shows. The pictures in your project now appear in the area at the bottom of the window (called the Photos drawer). You can drag them from there onto pages.

Figure 9-5. Initially, the menu at the lower right of All Pages view is set to Unused Photos (as shown here), which means you see all the unused images in your project in the Photos drawer (you can change this menu to Placed Photos instead). To place a picture onto a page, drag it from the drawer and drop it as shown here. To collapse the drawer, click the down-pointing arrow (circled). To expand it, click the same button again.

Tip

When you’re arranging pictures in your book, pay attention to where your subject’s eyes are pointing. If possible, position your subjects so they’re looking toward the middle of the book instead of off the page.

Also, you can amp up the visual interest by placing contrasting shots on the left and right side of each two-page spread. For example, if you put a portrait-type photo on the left-facing page, put a group shot on the right. Or if you put a shot of scenery on the left, use a shot with people in it on the right.

(Photos is happy to refill your newly emptied pages, too. Just select one or more thumbnails in the Photos drawer, and then click the Auto-Fill button. Photos automatically places those shots onto pages for you.)

If, on the other hand, you want to remove just a few pictures from the pages in your book, simply click a picture and hold down your mouse button until the picture pops out of its frame. Then drag it to the Photos drawer at the bottom of the window, and Photos swaps in a gray placeholder. To replace one picture with another, drag the picture from the Photos drawer onto the picture you want to replace it with. To swap two images, simply drag a picture from one page onto another, as Figure 9-6 explains.

Figure 9-6. Top: To swap pictures between pages, click and hold down your mouse button until the picture you clicked pops out of its frame. Middle: Drag the selected picture onto a picture on another page. Bottom: Release your mouse button and Photos swaps the two images. When you start swapping pictures between pages, you may need to adjust the picture’s zoom level and positioning inside the frame. Skip to page 251 to learn how.

To remove a picture from your project, select it in the Photos drawer and press the Delete key on your keyboard. You don’t get any kind of confirmation; the image simply disappears from the project (but remains in your Photos library).

Adding and Removing Pages

You can easily add or remove pages from your book project, as Figure 9-8 explains. Just be aware that your book has to be at least 20 pages long and have an even number of pages. You get a message saying that Photos will add a blank page if you delete a page that results in an odd number of pages. Removing a page doesn’t remove any of the pictures your project contains, but it does delete any captions you’ve added (Step 4: Edit and Format Text).

Figure 9-7. Top: To move pages around in your book project, drag the Page button (circled) onto another page (not between pages, but atop another one). Bottom: The page you’re moving appears beneath your cursor and subsequent pages scoot rightward to make room for the one you’re relocating. Release your mouse button to make it so.

Figure 9-8. To add a page to your project, select the page that precedes the one you want to add, and then choose Add Page from this menu. A new page appears to the selected page’s right. To remove a page from your project, select it, and then choose Remove Page from the same menu. You can also add or remove a page by Control-clicking its thumbnail and choosing Add Page or Remove Page from the shortcut menu that appears.

The maximum number of double-sided pages a book can contain is 100. If you need more pages than that to cover your adventures in the piney woods of East Texas, you’ll need to make a second book.

Tip

If you delete one page from a 100-page book, Photos merely adds a blank page to keep the page count at an even number. So to reduce the number of pages to 98, ⌘-click to select two pages, and then press the Delete key on your keyboard to get rid of them both.

Changing a Page’s Layout

When Photos lays out your book, it sprinkles in a variety of different page layouts. For example, some pages include one picture, while others contain two or three, and some pages have captions while others don’t. If you’re happy with Photos’ layout choices, great! You can skip to the next section and learn how to tweak the book’s photos. If not, you can easily change the book’s page layouts.

To do that, select the page you want to change, and then click the button circled in Figure 9-9 to open the Layout Options panel. Use the panel’s scroll bar to view all the different layout options; your choices depend on the kind of page you selected and the theme you picked when you started the project (Step 2: Choosing a Format and Theme).

Tip

The Layout Options panel floats on your screen independently of the Photos window. That means you can keep it open all the time if you want.

It’s important to understand that not all layouts are available for every kind of page, and not all layouts are available in every theme. Heck, some themes, such as Showcase, only let you have one photo on a page, so you don’t see layout options for more pictures than that as you scroll through the panel.

Front and back covers and flaps have the fewest layout options. For covers, you can generally choose between one and three photos with or without a title, and for flaps you can typically pick one small picture with or without text, or a completely blank page. Fortunately, you get a smorgasbord of layout design options for the other pages in your book:

• 1 Photo, 2 Photos, and so on. Layouts in these categories let you specify the number of pictures on the page. You get a wide array of choices for photo placement within each category. For example, some themes offer up to 17 different layouts for one photo per page, six layouts for two photos per page, and so on. Some layouts fill the whole page with your picture, some have room for text, some include borders—you get the idea.

  

  Figure 9-9. To open the Layout Options panel, click the button circled here. As you scroll in the panel, you see thumbnails of different layouts organized by the number of pictures per page. Scroll far enough down and you’ll find layouts that include maps and two-page spreads. If the layout you pick has blank space around the picture or an empty spot for captions, you can pick a background color by clicking one of the color chips shown here.

• Text. This option doesn’t include any picture slots; it simply creates a blank page with placeholder text that you can edit. For example, you can make page one of your book a text page that tells your audience the story behind the book. Or, if you’ll use the book as a portfolio, a text page could detail your artwork. Text pages can also serve as section dividers, telling the story of the images that follow.

• Map. The designs in this category add a map to your book page, which is a fun way to illustrate where you took your pictures (the top of Machu Picchu, anyone?). Once you add a map to a page, Photos checks to see if there are any locations associated with your pictures and, if it finds any, they automatically appear on the map. Happily, you can edit the map and remove, rename, or add your own locations, as well as customize the map’s zoom level and appearance.

  To open a map for editing, double-click the page it’s on to enter Single Page view. Next, double-click the map itself to select it and open the Map Options panel shown in Figure 9-10. (If the Options panel is already open, just single-click the map instead.)

Figure 9-10. Behold, the volcano Vesuvius! It looks scary even on this map. The Map Options panel lets you adjust the zoom level and find a specific location. You can add place markers (one was added here) and edit their labels to be as descriptive as you want. You can press Return on your keyboard to add a new line of text to a marker’s label, but the text covers up the marker’s pretty red dot.

Here are your options:

• — Change map style. The drop-down menu at the top of the panel lets you change map styles. Your choices are Standard (street-level view with text labels), Satellite (topographic view with no text labels), and Hybrid (topographic view with text labels—Figure 9-10 shows an example).

• — Add a place marker. If your pictures don’t contain location info, you can add your own place markers to the map. First, adjust the map so you can see the location you want to add. You can use the Map Zoom slider at the bottom of the panel to change the map’s zoom level (drag it left to zoom out) and drag the map itself to reposition it. When you find the spot you’re after, drag the Map Zoom slider rightward to zoom in, and then drag to reposition the map so you’re viewing the area you want.

  Next, add the place marker by Control-clicking the appropriate spot on the map, and then choosing Drop Pin from the shortcut menu that appears. (You can also click the Map Options panel’s + button to add a place marker to the area you’re currently viewing on the map.) To move the marker, point your cursor at the red dot, and then click and hold down your mouse button. When the dot gets bigger, drag to move the marker wherever you want.

• — Edit place marker. You can change a place marker’s label to say anything you want. Just double-click a label in the Map Options panel’s Places list or on the map itself, and then type the new text. If you’re tempted to enter more than one line of text, don’t (Figure 9-10 explains why). Instead, pick a layout option that includes a map and has room for your prose elsewhere on the page.

• — Remove a place marker. On the map, click a place marker to select it, and then press the Delete key on your keyboard. Alternatively, select a marker in the Map Options panel’s Places list, and then click the — sign.

• — Show/hide Marker Labels. If you don’t want to see place-marker labels, turn off this checkbox and you see only the place-marker dots.

When you’re finished editing the map, you can return to All Pages view by clicking the < button at the upper left of the Photos’ window.

• Spread. Layouts in this category spread a single picture across two full pages. These layouts have a big impact and give the viewer a visual treat because they’re so different from the rest. Try to use at least two or three spread layouts in a 20-page book; if your book is longer than that, consider using a spread layout every five pages or so.

• Blank. While this option doesn’t really sound like a layout at all, blank pages are quite useful for separating sections of your book. When you choose this layout, Photos creates a blank page that doesn’t include any photo frames—but that doesn’t mean it has to be stark white. You can fill it with color using the color bar at the bottom of the Layout Options panel or add a background image (Page Backgrounds tells you how).

Whew—that’s a lot of layout options! You’ll need to experiment to find the ones you like best. Generally speaking, it’s best to sprinkle different layouts throughout your book for the sake of variety, but there’s no law against using the same layout on every page. In fact, sticking to a one-photo layout with a wide, colored border can give your book a classy, fine-art feel.

Page Backgrounds

If the layout you picked has some empty space—meaning the photo doesn’t extend to the page’s edges on all four sides—you can specify a background color that’s visible in those empty areas. To do that, select the page in All Pages or Single Page view, and then open the Layout Options panel. In All Pages view, you do that by clicking the Options button in Photos’ toolbar (it’s circled back in Figure 9-9). In Single Page view, click the Options button beneath the page.

Either way, you see a color bar at the bottom of the Layout Options panel. Just click a color swatch to apply it as the background color. If you lean toward your screen and squint, you can see that the last swatch in the color bar is actually a gray picture placeholder (if the theme has a ton of background-color options, this swatch may be the last one in the first row of swatches). Click it to convert the page’s background to a picture frame that you can fill with another image. Then, when you select the background image, the panel changes to Photo Options and includes an Opacity slider, as Figure 9-13 shows.

You might not want to add a background image to every page, but on some it can make a big impact. Good candidates for background images include scenic shots such as sunsets, trees, and beaches, as well as closeup shots of textures (in other words, people pictures generally don’t work well as backgrounds).

Note

As of this writing, there’s a bug in the program that prevents you from seeing a background image you’ve placed onto a page in Single Page view, though it’s perfectly visible in All Pages view. Ah…such are the joys of using version 1.0 software.

Figure 9-13. Adding a background image to some pages can really make them pop. To keep the background image from overpowering the other images on the page, reduce its Opacity using the Photo Options panel: Drag the slider leftward to make the shot more see-through. In this example, the Fade filter was also applied to the background image to tone it down further.

Once you’re finished playing with layouts and pictures, you can move on to adjusting the text in your project. There’s no sense in messing with text until you finish placing your pictures and adjusting layouts, so save this step until the end.

Text opportunities abound in your book. For example, every book has a title that’s printed on the cover and, if you picked a hardcover format, its matching dust jacket. If you started your project with an album, Photos automatically uses the album’s name as the title, so you’ll probably need to change it. If you picked any layouts that have room for captions, you’ll want to edit those, too. Perhaps you added a text-page layout that you want to use to describe the motivation for your book or to serve as a bio, or maybe you want to add your contact info to the cover flap.

If there’s text on a page, you can easily edit it in Single Page view. After all, that’s the only place you can make the page thumbnails big enough to see the placeholder text they contain. Once you double-click a page to enter Single Page view, drag the zoom slider at the window’s upper left rightward to enlarge the page so you can see the text. Then use the scroll bar above the Photos drawer to position the text so you can see it (if the scrollbar is tough to grab with your cursor, try using a gesture on your Apple Magic Mouse or trackpad instead). Next, click a text box and start typing (Photos automatically highlights the placeholder text). When you do, the formatting controls shown in Figure 9-14 appear (if they don’t, just click the Options button in Photos’ toolbar to summon the panel).

When you’re finished, just click outside the text box to see the end result. You’re not forced into crafting your prose in Photos either. You can just as easily open your favorite text editor, enter your text there, and then use the Edit menu’s Cut, Copy, and Paste commands to transfer it from your text editor into Photos’ text boxes.

Figure 9-14. Top: As soon as you click some text, the Text Options panel appears. From top to bottom, you can use it to change the text’s font family, style (bold, italic, and so on), size, color, horizontal alignment, vertical alignment, number of columns, line height, and character spacing. If Photos detects a misspelled word, it underlines it in red, as shown here, and offers an alternate spelling.

Photo books aren’t cheap, and you’ve just spent a lot of time carefully crafting the contents of every page. After all that hard work, one final round of proofing is in order, just to make sure everything is squared away. Photos gives you a couple of different ways to do this.

The best way to proof a document of any kind is to print it. While that may not sound very earth-friendly, seeing your project on paper can illuminate errors you’d never spot on a computer screen. Plus, the print serves as a fantastic preview of what the real thing will look like. To print your book, open it in Projects view and then choose File→Print. In the OS X Print dialog box that opens, pick a printer, and then click Print (obviously, the printer needs to be turned on for this to work!).

Another option is to turn the project into a PDF file, which is short for Portable Document Format. PDFs can be opened on any kind of computer (Mac, Windows, Linux, or whatever). The great thing about PDFs is that they preserve all the images, fonts, and backgrounds so they look exactly like they do on your screen. That means you can send a PDF of your project off to someone else for proofing or approval, or just so they have a digital copy of the book (maybe you created a genealogy book for your family, and 20 of your closest cousins want a copy). Plus, PDFs are searchable. So if you captioned your pictures, your cousins can search for whomever they want to find in the book. You can also sync the PDF file onto your iOS devices using iTunes’ file-sharing abilities so you can show the book off on your iPad.

Here’s how to create a PDF file of your book and then get it onto your iOS device:

Now your beautiful book project will travel around with you wherever you go.

Once you finish proofing your book and it’s ready for printing, in Photos’ toolbar, click Buy Book. Photos does a quick check of your book to find any problems.

If the program finds any placeholder text (say, a caption that you didn’t edit), a message appears. Click Continue to ignore the message, or click Review to return to your project for more editing. Photos helpfully shows you where the problem is. Fix it, and then click Buy Book again.

Photos repeats the checking process each time you try to buy the book. Another kind of message you may encounter during this process is one involving text that’s too long to fit the box it’s in. You get the same Review and Continue options for this message, too. Once you fix the text, click Buy Book yet again.

A third kind of message you may encounter involves placeholder pictures; if Photos finds any, you see a message saying your book is incomplete. Click OK and Photos returns you to the page that needs fixing. Once you fix all the problems, click Buy Book again.

If Photos doesn’t find any more issues, a Checkout sheet appears. If this is the first time you’ve ordered a print product using Photos, you may be prompted to enter your Apple ID and password. Next, select a shipping address from the list by clicking the checkbox to the left of the name—you see all the addresses you’ve previously shipped stuff to—or click Add Shipping Address to add a new one. You can also ship books to more than one address. Once you pick a shipping address (or several), Apple calculates the order total. Use the Quantity field on the right to tell Photos how many books you want to send to each address: Click the + to increase the quantity or the — to decrease it.

When you’re finished, pull the trigger by clicking Place Order. Now all you have to do is bide your time until the book arrives in the mail. You’ll be mightily impressed when you hold the finished product in your hands! Now, pat yourself on the back for a project well done.

As with any Photos project, the first step is to pick the pictures you want to include. Unless you want to feature just one picture per page, it’s best to start your calendar project with 20-35 pictures. While some layouts let you squeeze oodles of pictures onto a page, calendars tend to look best when they feature just one to three photos per page; just use your own judgment.

It’s easiest to start your project from an album created specifically for the calendar project. That way, you can put the pictures in the order you want them to appear in the calendar, which saves you a bit of clicking and dragging later on. But if you prefer, you can begin your project by selecting a moment, individual thumbnails, or multiple albums. Chapter 3 teaches you how to select pictures and create albums.

Once you’ve selected your pictures, click the + button in Photos’ toolbar and choose Calendar. The screen shown in Figure 9-16 appears, which lets you set the length and starting date of the calendar.

Figure 9-16. Use this screen to pick how many months your calendar includes, as well as the starting month and year. You also get a nice big preview of what the finished calendar might look like. Told you they were beautiful!

Once you choose your settings, click Continue and the Choose Calendar Theme appears and shows you all of Photos’ calendar themes. Just like the book themes, each design has different layouts and color schemes. Photos checks online to see if Apple’s added any new themes. If it finds any, it adds their thumbnails, which display a tiny cloud icon at their lower right to indicate that they must be downloaded; that happens automatically if you choose one of those themes.

It’s tough to get any real sense of what the calendar will look like based on this screen’s thumbnails, so just pick one that looks good. You can always change it after Photos assembles the calendar (that way, you can see what each theme looks like using your pictures). The Big Date theme is especially nice because it uses really big numbers, which means you can see them without being nose-to-nose with the page itself.

To pick a theme, single-click its thumbnail and then click Create Calendar, or simply double-click its thumbnail. Either way, Photos assembles your calendar and presents it in All Pages view (Figure 9-17).

Figure 9-17. All Pages view gives you a satisfying sense of what your calendar will look like. You can move pages and pictures around in this view and use the Options panel to change layouts. The Settings panel lets you alter the calendar’s length and start date, add national holidays, change themes, and more.

Photos also saves your project so that it’s visible in Projects view and, if you turned it on, the sidebar (The Two Faces of Photos). You can rename the project, file it in a folder, or delete it, just like you can with any other project. You can exit the project and return to Projects view by clicking the left-facing arrow at the screen’s upper left (labeled in Figure 9-17), and then simply double-click your calendar project later on to reopen it and continue working on it. In other words, you don’t have to build the whole thing in one sitting.

You customize a calendar just like you do a book (Step 3: Customizing the Pages). For example, to move a page, click or point your cursor at it. When a rectangular icon appears below it (like the one circled in Figure 9-7), click the icon and hold down your mouse button. Drag the page on top of the one that’s in the desired location (in other words, don’t drag it between two pages). When the page in the target location dims, release your mouse button. Photos moves the selected page to its new home and shifts the rest of the pages rightward.

Figure 9-18. The Settings panel is available in both All Pages and Single Page view, and lets you change key settings for your calendar project. Be sure to settle on a theme before you start customizing each page, or else all your hard design work will go right out the window.

To move pictures around, click an image and hold your mouse button down until the picture pops out of the frame, and then drag it to another frame (see Figure 9-6). To remove a picture, drag it to the Photos drawer at the bottom of the window. You can also clear the pictures Photos automatically placed and add images yourself (Removing and Replacing Pictures), add more pictures to your project (Adding Pictures), as well as change layouts (Changing a Page’s Layout) and background colors (Page Backgrounds).

To fiddle with individual pictures and to mess with text, you need to double-click a page to enter Single Page view. That’s where you can change a picture’s zoom level and positioning with a frame, apply a filter, or open it in Edit mode. To do any of that stuff, double-click a picture in Single Page view and the Photo Options panel shown back on Manipulating Pictures appears.

To edit your calendar’s title or any captions, just click the placeholder text and type away. The Text Options panel shown back on Spell Checking automatically opens, which you can use to change the font family, size, style, color, and alignment. To add custom text to a date square, click the square and a text box appears (the Text Options panel also pops open). Just enter the text you want, and then format it to your liking. Date squares are really small, so it’s best to keep your prose brief.

For even more creativity, you can add a picture to a date square, as shown in Figure 9-19. Just drag a picture from the Photos drawer onto a date square; the square’s number disappears and the picture takes over the whole square. This is a great way to mark an important date involving someone special, such as a birthday, anniversary, or graduation.

Figure 9-19. Once you add a picture to a date square, double-click it to open the Photo Options panel shown here. In addition to the settings described on page 251, it includes a Caption menu. Use it to pick a location for the caption, and then edit and format the placeholder text that appears. Because the picture fills the square, the caption has to live above or below it, or to its left or right. Happily, there’s an arrow that points to the picture.

To remove a picture you’ve dropped onto a date square, click it, and then press the Delete key on your keyboard, or simply drag the picture into the Photos drawer at the bottom of the window. Removing the picture also removes the caption you added.

When you’re finished editing the pictures and text in a particular month, you can move to the next month by clicking one of the left or right-facing arrows that appear on either side of the calendar page in Single Page view (you can also use the arrow keys on your keyboard).

You can proof your calendar just like you can a book project, and it’s equally important to do, even though it may not include as much text as a book. So take the time to print it or turn it into a PDF as described on Step 5: Preview Your Project. And for goodness’ sake, remember to spell check your calendar using the techniques described on Spell Checking. Typos on a calendar are worse than typos in a book because you have to stare at the pages they’re on for a whole month!

When you’re finished inspecting your gorgeous new calendar, fire up Apple’s printing presses by clicking Buy Calendar at the upper right of the Photos window. When you do, the program takes a spin through your calendar looking for problems such as placeholder text, placeholder pictures, and text that’s too long to fit in its box. If Photos encounters any of these issues, it alerts you and lets you fix it. As Step 6: Buy the Book describes, just keep clicking Buy Calendar until you run out of error messages.

Photos then packages the calendar and uploads it. If this is the first print product you’ve ordered from Apple, you’ll be prompted to enter your Apple ID. The next screen lets you pick a shipping address, add additional addresses, and set the order quantity for each address. The total cost for your order appears at lower right. Click Place Order and try not to count the hours until your handcrafted calendar arrives in the mail (the packaging is nearly as impressive as the calendar itself). When it’s finally delivered, you’ll squeal with joy as you pore over every page as if it’s the first time you’ve seen it.