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The "humanware" change is to get yourself into the habit of ending your viewing session by pressing Cmd-W.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

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Get iPhoto to show a single image full-screen with ACDSee or JView


April 21, 2004


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, The Post-Standard

   iPhoto has come a long way in a couple of years, but it still lacks an essential function. It's still not able to show individual images full screen except as part of a slideshow.
   But you can add that capability to iPhoto easily. My recommended method -- using ACDSee as the default iPhoto "helper" application -- works splendidly but costs $40 if you don't already have ACDSee. A free alternative takes advantage of JView, another image viewer.
   iPhoto does an outstanding job organizing and displaying groups of digital photos. But there are times when you want to look carefully at one picture, not dozens, and in that kind of mode iPhoto seems awkward. Either you have to run a slideshow and then pause it (by pressing the spacebar) -- a crazy idea, indeed! -- or you have to click the "Edit" button and wait while iPhoto displays the photo larger. If you want a full-screen view without running a slideshow, you're out of luck.
   That's where ACDSee 1.6 comes in. It's the fastest image viewer overall for the Mac. (Tests I did for this article showed ACDSee was a little slower than its challenger, JView, when opening some medium-size images, but was much faster at displaying very large images.)
   You can get ACDSee from www.acdsystems.com/english/products/acdseemac. It costs about $40, but you can try it for free. JView is given away as freeware. Get it from http://home.nc.rr.com/jview/jview.html.
   Install ACDSee or JView in the main Applications folder or in your own Applications folder in your home folder; create it if you don't yet have it.
   The trick of getting ACDSee or JView to work with iPhoto is to make one of them the program that opens when you double-click a thumbnail image in iPhoto. Run iPhoto and click "Preferences" under "iPhoto." Choose "General," then click "Choose Application." Navigate within the file browser to ACDSee or to JView and choose whichever one you want to use.
   We're halfway there.
   If you're using ACDSee, you'll need to tell ACDSee to show images full-screen. Run ACDSee and click "Preferences" under "ACDSee." Choose "Viewer" at the top, then make sure ALL these boxes are checked: "Full-screen," "Hide mouse cursor in full-screen," "Shrink to fit window" and "Enlarge to fit window." Click OK. (The other settings don't have any effect on full-screen operation.)
   If you're using JView, open its preferences and click "Images & Scrollers." Put a check in the box labeled "Resize to Fit the Screen," and then click the circle next to "Allow to Blow Up." Click OK. JView isn't able to show images the way ACDSee does it -- full-screen, without anything else showing -- but it does a good job of showing them as large as possible. (Try it to see what I mean.)
   We're almost done. The software is set up OK, but now we have to make a change to the "humanware." Since you'll be using ACDSee or JView as an image viewer, not as an image cataloger or thumbnail viewer, you don't want the software to do anything more than show the image.
   The "humanware" change is to get yourself into the habit of ending your viewing session by pressing Cmd-W. Don't hit Escape or any other key. Cmd-W closes the image while keeping the program running. You'll go right back to iPhoto, and your chosen viewer will remain in memory waiting to spring into action again.