Can’t change Text Alignment in iPhoto

Description:

In iPhoto ’08 or iPhoto ’09 you are creating a calendar, album, photo book or postcard and want to change the alignment of some text like say on one of the captions and there is no buttons or menu options to change the text from say centered to left justified or right justified.

Even the ‘Show Fonts’ dialog box doesn’t have a way of aligning the text.

Have a look at the sample in the screenshot of ‘My Photo Book’ down the page a bit to see what I mean.

Symptoms:

• You created a photo book/photo album in iPhoto and discover that the text alignment beneath the photos cannot be changed to the way you want.
• You created a calendar in iPhoto and cannot adjust the alignment of the text for the calendar title, subtitle or author on the front page
• You created a postcard in iPhoto and cannot change the alignment of the text that will appear inside the postcard such as the title and your greetings.

Explanation:

The world knows at this stage that Apple make some great products and iPhoto is one of them, especially for the casual point ‘n shoot photo maniac so why deny the user as simple a task as aligning the text on their special photo projects?  It’s a mystery.

The fact is, the option to align text doesn’t exist in iPhoto’s Projects so we have to find another way of doing it.  Read on.

Screenshot of iPhoto ’08 Photo Book with title text aligned right

Solution – Align the text in another program

1. In iPhoto, create your photo project as normal (i.e. your album, postcard, calendar or photo book)
2. When you come across a piece of text or caption that you want to change the alignment of do the following:
   1. Select/highlight the text with your mouse
   2. Press CMD+X to cut the text to clipboard
   3. Open TextEdit or another preferred editor capable of editing rich text such as Word, Pages, NeoOffice, etc. In this example, I’m using TextEdit.
   4. Make sure TextEdit is set to Rich Text Editing.  This is evident by the toolbar at the top as shown in the screenshot below.
   5. If you can see the toolbar for editing text then it’s set to Rich Text.  If you can’t see the toolbar then click Format menu > Make Rich Text

   

   6. Now press CMD+V or click Edit > Paste to paste the contents of your clipboard into TextEdit
   7. On the toolbar, click the alignment button of your choice; left, right, centered or fully justified
   8. When the text is aligned as you would like it, highlight/select all the text again
   9. Press CMD+X to cut the text to your clipboard
   10. Open your project in iPhoto again
   11. Click into the area where you originally cut the text from within your project
   12. Press CMD+V to paste the text

   

   13. Now your caption should be aligned as you want it.  As you can see from my screenshot above.  I’ve aligned mine in the center.