How do you remove captions from photo books in iPhoto 9.5.1?

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Level 1

12 points

How do you remove captions from photo books in iPhoto 9.5.1?

I wanted to see what a photo book created in iPhoto '11 looks like with my own pics so I made one the simplest way possible: picked an event, chose a format, clicked "buy book." It arrived yesterday and it's gorgeous but I want the next ones to be even better. In the "Folio" layout every page has a default copyright notice. I don't need that. Every page has the photo's name, useful stuff like "DSC_1518." I don't need that either. Is there a way to remove the entries from every caption box all at once? If I can empty all of them at once I can easily put back the entries I actually want. I can manually empty them but that's 4 captions on every one of 96 pages. Clearing one and clicking "change everywhere" doesn't do it. I don't want to remove the boxes, just the default entries in all of them.

Thanks

iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9.2)

Posted on Mar 26, 2014 9:51 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

J Hayes Author

Level 1

12 points

Mar 27, 2014 1:39 PM in response to J Hayes

Anyone mind if I answer my own question? Good, here goes.

There is no way to remove the text from all the text boxes on every page of a photo book at once but there is a way to clear them: use a "non-printing" font. Technically, the text is still there but it doesn't display or print. There are no glyphs mapped to the characters in the text box.

How do you do this? Get on the ol' WonderWeb and search for "AdobeBlank.otf", download it and install it. It's a really small download since there are no glyphs in it. How do you install a font? Double-click the downloaded file and follow the prompts. The next time you go into iPhoto, select some text and bring up the options, "Adobe Blank" will appear at the top of the font list. Select it and watch your text disappear. Click "Change Everywhere" and watch it all disappear.

Now for the disclaimer: I haven't actually ordered a book using this but it should work, iPhoto does let you choose user fonts every place you can choose a font so presumably user fonts are uploaded as a part of the print project. After all, that is industry practice.

Do I get points for answering my own question?

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Answer 2

Old Toad

Level 10

207,439 points

Mar 27, 2014 3:09 PM in response to J Hayes

If you use a theme that has layouts without text boxes or themes that do not have autoload of text the text will not print even though you get a warning before ordering. Folio is the only theme that automatically puts in some text. The others just have placecard text that does not print.

You can test it by by proofing the book according to this Apple document: iPhoto, Aperture: Previewing an order in iPhoto or Aperture.

These are two pages from the Picture Book theme of a 2 photo per page layout. One has text and the other doesn't. The text you see is placecard text and will not display when printed.

This is a screenshot of the pages in the PDF file:

No text on the second page.

OT

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Answer 3

J Hayes Author

Level 1

12 points

Mar 28, 2014 8:36 AM in response to Old Toad

Sounds good in theory...

That placecard text that doesn't print - the test book I had printed is full of it. Oops.

And if using a theme that doesn't have text boxes doesn't fit your layout or other requirements you're stuck with one option: find a way to clear out the text. Sure would be nice if Apple had included a preference panel for each layout, you know, a place where users could specify the default text they want and remove the defaults from areas where they don't want it but... wait a minute, sounds like a feature request!

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Answer 4

Old Toad

Level 10

207,439 points

Mar 28, 2014 8:49 AM in response to J Hayes

If you printed the Folio theme then there are two fields that do contain printable text: the copyright field and the file name field.

Here's the page in iPhoto:

Here's the page in a print to PDF file. You will notice that the "Insert a caption" and "Insert a description of your photo" do not appear.

To my knowledge Folio is the only theme at inserts text automatically.

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