Patti O'Shea's Blog

My original plan for the blog was to do a slide show of my flower pictures. I have a bunch of shots that I’ve taken in the last few days and some of them turned out really cool. I ran into a small problem, though. I wanted to do it quick and easy on my iMac without having to login to my Windows virtual machine to access the software I normally use. It’s kind of a pain and iPhoto should do everything, right?

Well, maybe if I knew what the heck I was doing. I imported the pictures off the camera okay, but trying to save them was a nightmare. I finally managed to save a picture. That would be singular. One photo. And tried to figure out how to save the others. Somehow instead of getting my pictures in the folder, I imported chat icons. How? I have no clue, but they’re there and I can’t get rid of them. Or at least I gave up trying to get rid of them and returned to moving photos to the folder. It can’t be hard, right? This is a Mac!

My woes continued. Because I accidentally somehow imported the chat icons, my flower pictures were gone because they had been under the Last Imported section. Now the icons were there. I finally managed to locate the edited pictures under the imported in the last year area. Sigh. I went with the drag and drop philosophy and managed to get all my pictures in the folder at last.

Now I thought, let’s resize them all to 400 pixels wide so that they don’t get so big that it’s impossible for people to watch the show. Um, I couldn’t figure out how to resize them at all. I finally clicked on crop and tried the custom feature, but putting 400 in the box made the picture bigger, not smaller, and to make things even better, it doesn’t automatically put in the height for me. What? I just know I want it 400 wide, the program needs to tell me what size the height should be to maintain the proper aspect ratio. Grrr.

I decided to try to create a slide show anyway–for me if no one else. I thought I’d do it in iMovie. I know, but in Windows Movie Maker, it lets me add still photos as well as movie clips and I figured the Mac would let me do the same thing. I want to be able to do that, dang it, because in my spare time (if I ever have any again in my life), I want to play with making book videos for my old books. I had them professionally done for my last three titles and they’re cool! But I can’t justify spending money on the old books. Now, of course, that plan is shot because it appears iMovie will only work with movie clips. If I’m wrong, please tell me where to find out how to add stills.

So I return to iPhoto. Yes, I can make slide shows there. I try to select my pictures as mentioned in the help directions and it doesn’t work. Yep, my photos won’t stay highlighted.

At this point, I gave up and logged into the Windows side of my Mac and did all the cropping and then uploaded the shots to Webshots. I looked at the time, thought about how tired I feel right now and how much other stuff I have left to do yet tonight and thought, the hell with it. I’ll shoot for the next blog posting.

What I wanted to do tonight was research an idea I have for the story that’s in pre-book. Every day the story gels more and more in my mind, but I need to learn a little bit more about one aspect that came to me so I can decide whether or not it’s going to pan out. Didn’t get to that. I also really want to find a picture of my heroine. She’s proving elusive. Thank goodness, Kel is Logan’s identical twin and I can just use the pictures of Logan that I had for the last book, but I’ve already spent two nights looking for his heroine and have come up empty.

Maybe tomorrow.