Question on Gallery Widget.

No, as it stands right now the gallery widget can only fill the entire box. The smallest size images can be made inside the widget is to make the short side the same size as the box and the long side will get cropped.

maybe you could add padding to the sides (such as a black or white background) in photoshop

so the original image you insert is horizontal like the others

ie pre crop/size in photoshop.

After giving up on trying to resize my images in Photoshop and/or iBooks Author 1.1, I finally ended up with the following workaround. Perhaps there’s a more elegant solution, but this is the only way I could consistently make my “portrait layout” type images fit the widget box perfectly:

1. ) Drag the image straight into your document (without putting it in a widget).
2. ) Make your image the size you want it to appear once it’s actually in the widget box. (Click on the Inspector, then the ruler icon so that you can see the current size of your image. Resize your image so that it is at least 279 pt wide and 242 pt long since that is the minimum size of the gallery widget.)
3. ) Insert the gallery widget. Under Layout, uncheck title and caption for now. Leave background checked. Under the ruler, make sure constrain proportions is unchecked.
4. ) While the gallery widget is selected, go to Arrange and select “Send Backwards” so that the widget is behind the photo you inserted in step 1.
5. ) Move the image on top of the widget. Resize your widget until the photo appears to fit inside the empty box perfectly.
6. ) Delete the image.
7. ) NOW, go back and actually insert the image into the widget box you resized in step 5. While the gallery widget is selected, go back and check constrain proportions. Also, add whatever titles, thumbnails, etc. you may want.
8. ) You can add more photos to this gallery. As long as they have the same aspect ratio as the one that’s already in the widget, they should fit. If not, try using the “edit mask” to adjust them one by one.

Hope this helps someone:)

that's a round about way of doing something simple. but, i can't find a better way either. thanks for the post. for some reason, you can make the image bigger but not smaller.

Another approach I just tested is as follows:

1. put the images you wish to have in the gallery into the photo library on your mac.

2. activate the photo stream function on the mac and the iPad, wireless network operating.

3. watch the images in full scale on the iPad, which scales all images to touch the borders of your iPad.

4. take screen-shots of each picture using the two buttons home and sleep

5. transfer theese screen-shots back into your mac with the photo stream function

6. now you have equal sized pictures for that gallery widget.

It is rather a workaround not having to use graphic processing software and not very orthodox ;-)