Inside: Burn your photos, take out the trash
I have to admit I’m a little burnt out this week. I spent a couple days and a bunch of blank CDs trying to figure out how to best use the Burn function in iPhoto. My conclusion: Don’t use it.
But I haven’t been spending all my time indoors wrestling with sometimes-too-simple software. I took a nice hike in the recently reopened Angeles National Forest, exploring areas that were scorched a couple years ago in the devastating Station Fire. It’s amazing how quickly nature starts to recover after such an intense burn. If you look closely you’ll see some photos I took in a couple of this week’s videos. If you’re in a rush, here they are:
How to burn a CD of photos in iPhoto
How to burn a CD of photos (or any files)
But if you have a couple minutes, class is in session for the…
Word of the Week
The word is “burn”.
Unlike the terrible burn that took place in my nearby forest, on your Mac, “burn” is a good word. Burning is the process of writing data to an optical disc like a CD or DVD. The data can be anything–documents, photos, music, video, etc.
Often there’s more than one way to burn a particular type of data. Photos can be burned as individual files, as a slideshow movie, or even on a DVD you can watch on your TV. As you’ll see in next week’s videos, music can also be burned to discs in numerous ways.
Why is it called burning? It’s because a tiny laser is used to burn the data bits onto the disc. So why isn’t the disc nice and toasty after you burn it? Well, it’s not really burning, but it is heating it enough to make microscopic changes in a special dye inside the disc.
Although each data bit stored is microscopic, you can still see the effect with your naked eye. Optical discs are burned from the inside hole out toward the edge so, unless you’ve completely filled one, if you hold it at the right angle you should be able to see an inner band showing where you’ve burned your photos, music, or whatever.
Burning a CD of photos in iPhoto
As I mentioned above, the best way to burn a CD to share photos from your iPhoto library is NOT the Share/Burn command. If you’ve found a good use for that, please reply to this email and let me know. Maybe I just expected too much from it.
Instead, I recommend using the method I show in these two videos. The first shows two ways to export your desired photos from iPhoto, and the second shows how to burn them (or any other files for that matter) onto a CD or DVD.
How to burn a CD of photos in iPhoto
How to burn a CD of photos (or any files)
Emptying the iPhoto Trash
I’m still amazed I never noticed the iPhoto Trash before. It’s handy in case you accidentally delete a photo, but emptying the trash completely from your hard drive takes two steps, as I show in this video:
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