iPhone's MobileMe Gallery on Your MacBook

By Mark L. Chambers from MacBook All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition

iPhoto ’11 includes a feature called MobileMe Gallery that does for images what podcasting does for audio: You can share your photos with friends, family, business clients, and anyone else with an Internet connection! (Your adoring public doesn’t even require a MacBook or other Mac; it can use That Other Kind of Computer, or one of those crazy Linux systems.)

iPhoto automatically uploads the selected images and leads you through the process of creating a new web page to proudly display your photos. However, you must be a MobileMe subscriber to use the MobileMe Gallery feature.

It’s important to note that MobileMe service is being discontinued in June 2012, and Apple is no longer accepting any new subscribers.

To create a MobileMe Gallery, you must first designate one or more photos in the Viewer (or even select entire albums or Events in the Source list). Click the Share button and then choose MobileMe Gallery from the pop-up menu. To create a new album, select (you guessed it) New Album; alternatively, you can add new photos to an existing Gallery by clicking the corresponding thumbnail.

If you’re creating a new Gallery, iPhoto prompts you for a name. You can elect to show the title of each photo, allow your visitors to download your images or upload their own, and even allow photos to be uploaded by other computer owners using an e-mail client or a web browser!

By default, any visitor to your MobileMe website can see your gallery. But what if you prefer a little security for those images? In that case, click the Album Viewable By pop-up menu, where you can limit your viewing audience (you can even require that your visitors enter a login name and password before they can receive your photos).

Click Publish, and you’ll see that iPhoto indicates that your images are being uploaded with a cool twirling progress icon to the right of the album in the source list. When the process is complete, iPhoto indicates that the photos appear in a MobileMe Gallery with a new heading in the Source list. You’re on the air!

Any changes you make to the contents of your MobileMe Gallery are updated automatically on your MobileMe account, and, in turn, are updated automatically to everyone who receives your images.

Now for the other side of the coin: By selecting your MobileMe Gallery in the Source list and clicking the Info button on the toolbar, you can choose Tell a Friend to share the news about your new additions! iPhoto automatically prepares an e-mail message in Apple Mail that announces your new Gallery. Just add the recipient names and click Send. This spiffy message includes instructions for

Folks using iPhoto ’11 on a Mac: As you can imagine, this is the easiest receive option to configure. After these folks are subscribed, they get an automatically updated album of the same name that appears in their source list, and they can use those images in their own iPhoto projects!

From within iPhoto, your visitors can subscribe to your MobileMe Gallery by clicking File→Subscribe to Photo Feed and entering the subscription URL.
Folks using Windows or an older version of iPhoto: These subscribers can use any web browser with RSS support (such as the Safari browser that comes with Lion and is available from Apple for Windows XP, Vista, and 7) or any RSS reader. (In effect, your MobileMe Gallery becomes an RSS feed for those with a version of iPhoto previous to iLife ’11.)