Hawk Wings » iphoto

iPhoto2Gmail: Integrating iPhoto with Gmail

Tim Gaden — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 10:47:54 +0000

Juan Ignacio Leon’s excellent iPhoto2Gmail plugin has been updated and now offers even smarter ways for Gmail users to email photos from iPhoto.

Basically, it adds a pane to iPhoto’s “Export…” dialog:

The updated version offers a Contacts button that pulls down your Gmail contacts so that you pick the recipient(s) from that list.

Other new features include:

- A bugfix for RAW and other non-jpeg files that were not properly renamed when scaled.
- A fix for some situations in which the plugin would try to send message without recipients.
- Re-written code to be Object Oriented and Modular for maintainability.

You can get the revised version from Juan’s web site .iphoto, gmail, photos, webmail, plugin, web 2.0, integration, emailSimilar Posts:

Roll your own postcards in Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 10:35:39 +0000

Postcards is an utility that lets you roll your own postcards or e-cards and send them easily with Mail.app.

To get started all you need to do is drop an image from your iPhoto library (or from anywhere for that matter) onto the app’s main window.

You can resize and reposition it, add a message in the pane to the right (adjust the font and text size to suit), and then add a stamp to the top of the postcard:

You can add a stamp from the library that comes with the app in the slide-out drawer on the right, or you can double-click on the stamp on the postcard.

You then get the chance to make your own stamp, using the built-in stamp editor:

Even the postmark can be customised.

When the postcard is finished, â‡§-âŒ˜-A opens it up in a new Mail.app message, ready to go.

The developer also provides a zip file of handwriting fonts to add that extra touch of hand-crafted realism.

In an extra nice touch, the app can capture an image from an iSight camera. Since mine is built-in into the top of the screen, I can grab an image of wherever I am and send it.

In minutes you can knock up a postcard to a loved one or a swanky promo for your pet project:

Postcards is shareware (USD 10) and available from the developer’s web site . You can try before you buy, but the postcards are watermarked “unlicenced” until you pay.

[Thanks, Anthony!]mail.app, apple mail, postcards, ecards, photos, iPhoto, roll your own, plugins, addons, anti-productivity, iSight, George BushSimilar Posts:

On Emailing Photos with Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 13:58:49 +0000

Apple has published a tip on re-sizing photos in Mail “on the fly” which was picked up by TUAW (and others).

It points out that if you drag a full-sized photo into a new message window, you can then resize it using the drop-down menu in the bottom righthand corner to Large (1280×800 pixels), Medium (640×400) or Small (320×200) sizes:

Now, obviously, any Mail tip is a good one by definition and any resizing is better than none for your Sent Mail folder, your bandwidth and your recipient, but there is one thing that the tip doesn’t mention.

Mail sucks at resizing images.

A year ago, Rob Griffiths ran the tests and did the sums when the same tip was posted on macOSXHints. He discovered that Photoshop is between 61% and 73% more efficient at the same tasks. Even iPhoto itself does a better job.

Not everyone owns or likes sledge hammer apps like Photoshop, but if you do this a lot, you could consider utilities like Downsize or Scale to Mail, which will resize your images efficiently without the need to fire up the monster.

If you are reading this but for some perverse reason don’t use Mail, resized photos may still be within your grasp. If you use Claris Emailer, GyazMail, Mailsmith, Outlook Express, PowerMail or QuickMail Pro, Simon Jacquier’s iPhoto Mailer Patcher lets you hack iPhoto to set your email client as the recipient of resized photos.iphoto, mail.app, apple mail, images, photos, resizing, mailsmith, powermail, gyazmail, tipsSimilar Posts:

iPhoto2Gmail: Email photos with Gmail

Tim Gaden — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 12:26:32 +0000

A plugin for iPhoto exists that extends the range of email clients you can use to email photos from iPhoto, but nothing so far plugs that gap for webmail services.

Juan Leon stepped up to the challenge. He has produced an iPhoto plugin that uses Gmail to send photos.

After you install the package, you will find a new pane in iPhoto’s Export menu (File > Export in iPhoto 6, Share > Export in iPhoto 5):

The only possible pitfall here are the options for sizing the images. If the image you want to send is less than 800 pixels in width or height, the plugin enlarges it to that size. In that case, just select “Send original”.

Juan says that the plugin “is still a very early piece of software, probably has many bugs, and is rough around the edges”. I emailed a dozen photos of varying size and format tonight and it seems to work fine.

The resulting emails look good:

He welcomes constructive criticism at the email address you can find on his web page where you will also find the plugin, which is donationware.gmail, iphoto, email, photos, exporting, sharing, plugin, googleSimilar Posts:

iPhoto Mailer Patcher 4.1: Use iPhoto with more email clients

Tim Gaden — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 12:28:50 +0000

Simon Jacquier’s iPhoto Mailer Patcher is been updated so that it will work with any version of iPhoto 4.0 to 6.0.4.

By default, iPhoto’s “Send photos by email” feature only supports AOL, Eudora, Mail.app and Microsoft’s Entourage. iPhoto Mailer Patcher adds support for Claris Emailer, GyazMail, Mailsmith, Outlook Express, PowerMail and QuickMail Pro. Only Thunderbird misses out, due to its “unscriptability”.

Getting Simon’s hack to work with iPhoto 5 or 6 used to involve manually editing the ClientAppSignatures.plist file in iPhoto’s package. It was messy. Now it is all automated by the Patcher’s installer.

iPhoto Mailer Patcher is donation-ware and is available from Simon’s web site .iphoto, mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, GyazMail, mailsmith, powermail, quickmail pro, email in general, photos, email, appleSimilar Posts:

kip: Tag-smart iPhoto for PDFs

Tim Gaden — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 11:43:52 +0000

Described by the developers as “iPhoto for PDFs”, kip offers tagging, sorting, searching and syncing with iDisk for your PDFs. Its scanning features also promise a way to centralise and organise all those bills, receipts, reports, and other bits of paper laying around the house.

Screenshots and more on kip’s features after the jump.

After you import your PDFs, kip’s main interface presents a list of tags in a window on the left, sized by frequency, a main window containing iPhoto-like thumbnails of your documents and a Details window on the right:

Click on image for a larger view

One nice feature is provided by a “zooming” mouse pointer. kip displays a zoom window with a list of current tags wherever you hold your mouse over the PDF’s thumbnail:

The app’s Preferences pane allows you to list a series of tags that kip will search for automatically when importing, to sync your PDFs on your iDisk and to manage how tags are added:

Selecting an individual PDF produces a pane on the right that lists information and tags for that document.

The tags here—which I haven’t edited—demonstrate how kip will match Proper nouns but doesn’t always pick up the title of PDFs in its tagging.

Any MailTags user will be instantly at home here. Keywords can be added, deleted or edited. You can open an information Inspector for the document or open it with Preview. It also keeps an eye on your iDisk usage.

A scanning feature allows documents to be saved straight into the app. It also inserts an “Add to kip” to the PDF services in the Print menu of your apps, making it easy (if you remember) to add a copy of new documents to kip’s database.

It’s clever and innovative and slick, no question. I haven’t decided yet whether it adds enough to my productivity to replace the list of PDFs that a Spotlight search spits out. Time will tell.

The current version of kip (1.0.1) is free, although the developers warn that they will be charging for future versions of the app. You can get it from their web site .

[With thanks to Scott "This is Fricken great!" Morrison]pdfs, iphoto, tagging, tags, productivity, information management, documents, searching, not apple mailSimilar Posts:

Emailing photos in Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 12:52:39 +0000

MegaPixel Maven posts a tip on resizing photos in Mail.app using the “Image Size” drop box in the bottom right-hand corner of the Compose window.

As the author points out, you can use this function to reduce an image in the Compose window to Large (1280×800 pixels), Medium (640×400) or Small (320×200) sizes.

Three points:

Mail does a really bad job of reducing the image. Rob Griffiths ran some tests on this when the tip was posed on macOSXHints last year. He discovered that Photoshop is between 61% and 73% more efficient at the same tasks. Even iPhoto itself does a better job.

Another option is to use a utility like Downisze or Scale to Mail, which will resize your images efficiently without the need to fire up a monster like Photoshop.

If you use Claris Emailer, GyazMail, Mailsmith, Outlook Express, PowerMail or QuickMail Pro, Simon Jacquier’s iPhoto Mailer Patcher lets you hack iPhoto to set your email client as the recipient of resized photos. Instructions can be found in an earlier Hawk Wings post.

iphoto, mail.app, apple mail, images, photos, resizing, mailsmith, powermail, gyazmail, tips Similar Posts:

Quickies: A Sunday brunch of Mail.app links

Tim Gaden — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 14:28:58 +0000

Dizzy after banging my head on the desk, trying to exorcise the evil demon of John Gruber from my WordPress installation and force Live Comment Preview to work, I present the rest of the day’s posts as quick links:

Rui Carmo posts on how to read your .Mac mail with a Sony Ericsson K750i phone using its in-built IMAP support.

Pierre Igot‘s eagle eye finds three things (that’s one , two , three ) wrong with the way that Mail.app and iPhoto work together to email photos.

Following the posting here of the hunt for people to help Apple’s Mail team with the next version of Mail.app, Andrew Brehaut posts on the frustrations of applying for jobs with Apple .

The Mail.app plugin Mail Attachments Iconizer has been updated as a universal binary .

Jason Clarke posts a useful collection of links on “email triage” or strategies to stay on top of your inbox. See also Itzy Sabo’s site, Email Overload which is devoted to this topic.

mail.app, apple mail, tips, IMAP, k750i, email triage, productivity, Apple, iphoto, mail attachments iconizerSimilar Posts:

iCal email notifications with other clients

Tim Gaden — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 13:51:13 +0000

One of the really nice things about Mail.app is the way it works closely with other iApps like iCal, Address Book and iPhoto. But Mail doesn’t have the stranglehold on integration.

A while ago, I posted about iPhoto Mailer Patcher, a hack for iPhoto that allows you to set Claris Emailer, GyazMail, Mailsmith, Outlook Express, PowerMail or QuickMail Pro as the default email client to which iPhoto sends resized images for you to email.

ZappTek provides hacks to help other email clients send iCal notifications. There are patches for Entourage, Eudora, Mailsmith, PowerMail and GyazMail.

Because it lacks AppleScript support, Thunderbird misses out on both counts.

Think carefully though. The developer warns that you will need to reinstall iCal in order to undo the installer’s modifications, if you change your mind later.mail.app, apple mail, iphoto, ical, notification, GyazMail, Mailsmith, PowerMail, Eudora, Thunderbird Similar Posts:

iPhoto Mailer Patcher in iPhoto 5

Tim Gaden — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 00:45:14 +0000

Before Christmas, I blogged about iPhoto Mailer Patcher. It was a time to share the love.

iPhoto Mailer Patcher is an AppleScript-based utility for iPhoto that allows you to set Claris Emailer, GyazMail, Mailsmith, Outlook Express, PowerMail or QuickMail Pro as the default email client to which iPhoto sends resized images for you to email.

By default, iPhoto only supports Eudora, Mail.app, Entourage and AOL.

But the Patcher only works with iPhoto 4. To get it work with iPhoto 5 you will need to follow the instructions left by the developer Simon Jacquier in the comments to the original post.

The instructions and some screenshots follow the jump.

Open the iPhoto package by Command-clicking on its icon in your Applications folder and Selecting “Show package contents”

Browse to Contents/Resources/ and find the ClientAppSignatures.plist.

Open it (make a backup first) and add these lines just before the < /dict > tag:
Claris Emailer
MMan
GyazMail
GYML
Mailsmith
BLTO
Outlook Express
MSNM
PowerMail
Cmlt
QuickMail Pro
CeLP

Here:

Download the patch for iPhoto 4 and open its package (as above in Step 1)

Dig inside and you will find an AppleScript and a TIFF file for each of the mail clients.
Take the two files for your preferred client and drop them in iPhoto’s Contents/Resources/Script folder. Or take all of them. You never know how fashions will change.

If all goes well, at the end you will see the following drop down box in the General Pane of iPhoto’s Preferences and can select the mail client of your choice:

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