.Mac and iLife’08 allow you to share all your photos and videos in customized galleries with your friends and family, directly from iPhoto or iMovie. So instead of wasting time putting those snaps and videoclips from the Christmas Holidays onto a DVD and having to send a copy to each and every one, which takes time and money, you can just publish them all online, create a unifying theme and then send the link to everyone you want. It’s quicker, looks great and is really easy to work with.
Improvements to the .Mac Web Gallery now allow Aperture users to publish their photos directly online and even allow online visitors to download the RAW file (Apple offers 10 Gb of storage space in .Mac). With iPhoto’08, online visitors will be able to download pictures in their original format or a print friendly 16 by 20 inch size. The new .Mac Web Gallery also lets friends publish their pictures to your own gallery, with new additions automatically synced to your iPhoto’08 library.
If you follow a friend’s web gallery, you can also subscribe to their RSS feed, which takes into account the whole gallery, not just an album. Photos and videos can also be protected via a password. Apple TV 2.0 users will be glad to know that they now have access to the Web Galleries straight from their TV.
Not everyone will be willing to pay the annual $100 subscription fee to the .Mac service. I still think it’s worth giving it a go to test out all these improvements in the Web Gallery though.
