When you create a photo album in Elements, you organize your images onto pages that can be printed or saved as a PDF file and attached to an e-mail message or linked to a Web site.
Figure 7-10:
Elements makes it easy to turn digital images into photo album pages and Web galleries.
You can’t create a photo album until you have created a catalog (a good first step to organizing your images anyway). The instructions in the “Gathering Your Images” section, earlier in this chapter, show you how to create catalogs and collections.
To create a photo album, follow these steps:
1. Click the Create button or choose File➪New➪Creation.
After a few seconds, the Creation Setup window appears.
2. In the Select a Creation Type list, double-click Photo Album Pages.
The Create Photo Album Pages wizard opens.
3. Specify the style of your album and choose from a list of options:
a. Click to select the style you want to use for your photo album.
The panel on the right side of the window features a long list of style choices, with thumbnail samples of each option. If you click the style name once, you can view a sample of the style in the main portion of the window, as shown in Figure 7-11.
Figure 7-11:
Choose a style for your album pages.
b. At the bottom of the window, select the page options you want to include.
Click to select the options you want, such as page numbers, headers, and footers. If you click the Captions option, you can add captions in the Customize dialog box later. You can also choose how many images you want to include on each page by selecting a number from the Photos Per Page list.
c. Click the Next Step button.
The Arrange Your Photos window opens
4. At the top of the Arrange Your Photos window, click the Add Photos button.
The Add Photos dialog box opens, as shown in Figure 7-12.
5. Add photos from a combination of sources:
a. Use the options under Add Photos From to view photos in your catalogs or collections.
When you select an option from the left pane, such as Entire Catalog, the images are displayed as thumbnails in the right pane.
b. Click to select the check box next to each photo that you want to include on your album pages.
Figure 7-12:
Select the photos you want to include in your album.
c. Click OK.
The Add Photos dialog box closes and the Create Photo Album Pages window becomes fully visible again.
6. In the Create Photo Album Pages window, click and drag to change the order in which your photos will appear in the album, and then click Next Step.
Note that each image thumbnail (one for each image that you added to the album) has a page number. You can use your mouse to drag the thumbnails to another position in the album. As you drag, a vertical line follows your mouse, indicating the location where the image will end up when you release the mouse button.
7. In the Customize window, double-click the title area to edit the text, and then click Done.
Replace the words Double-click to Insert Titlewith your caption, and use the options in the dialog box to specify the font, size, alignment, and style of the title text. In the example shown in Figure 7-13, I’ve changed the title to Our Family Tree.
Figure 7-13:
You can add titles and captions to your photo album and change the formatting of the text.
8. Use the View Page pull-down list at the top of the Customize window to view and edit the pages in your photo album, and then click Next Step.
You can edit a caption on your album pages, just as you edited the title on the first page, by double-clicking the caption area and using the options in the Caption dialog box to specify the font, size, alignment, and style of the text. You can write captions as long as you like, but if you want your images to appear on one page, limit yourself to no more than a sentence or two for each image.
9. In the Album Pages Name box, name your album and then click Save.
You can type a name or use the title page for the name by clicking the Use Title for Name option.
10. In the Share window, click to select the option that corresponds to what you want to do with your album.
Your options are as follows:
•Create a PDF:Shown in Figure 7-14, this option saves your album in portable document format (PDF), a common format for sharing documents on the Internet. If you choose this option, you are prompted with three quality options. Optimize for Viewing Onscreen makes the PDF file as small as possible (the best option if you want to e-mail your photo album or add it to a Web page).
Optimize for Printing is the best option if you want to print your file (you can e-mail a PDF at this quality setting, but it will take longer to download). Use Full Resolution if you want to leave your images untouched.
•Print: This option opens the Print dialog box, where you can spec-ify how you want to print your pages.
•E-mail:This option creates a PDF file and also automates the process of sending that PDF file as an attachment to an e-mail mes-sage. When you select E-mail option, the Attach Creation Items to E-mail dialog box opens, and you can enter the e-mail address of Figure 7-14:
You can save your album as a PDF file.
the person you want to send the album to and specify the quality you want for your images. (Unless you and the person you are sending the photo album to both have fast Internet connections, choose the Optimize for Viewing on a Screen option so that the file will download more quickly.) Elements takes care of everything: It creates a PDF file of your album, launches your e-mail program, composes a message to the address you entered, and attaches the PDF file to the message. All you have to do is add a personal mes-sage to the e-mail and click the Send button.
11. When you’re finished, click Done.
Elements saves your creation.
PDF, which stands for Portable Document Format, is a common format for documents that contain text or graphics and is especially useful when you want to preserve formatting. You can add a PDF file to a Web page as you would to any other page in your Web site — by creating a link. (You can find instructions for creating links in Chapter 8.)
If you want to use your PDF file on your Web site, make sure to give it a Web-friendly name, meaning don’t use special characters or spaces. To view a PDF file, your visitors must have Adobe Acrobat Reader, a free viewer that can be easily downloaded from www.adobe.comand is now built into most Web browsers.