In the transition from iLife '06 to '08, one of the shifts in iPhoto functionality was the deprecation of photocasts in favor of .Mac web galleries. Sure, your friends and family can still subscribe to an RSS feed of your pictures (and what kind of loving grandparent doesn't want a newsfeed full of Halloween costumes and messy-breakfast snapshots?), but despite the enhanced gallery views in '08, some key features didn't roll forward -- in particular, while '06 photocasts could include original size, full-res picture files for downloaders, '08 web galleries downsized and/or recompressed most photos. Some may not have noticed the degradation in quality, but for the photo purists, including my colleague Jeff L., this was not an improvement.

Today Jeff came by my desk practically jumping for joy. Tucked away in yesterday's iPhoto update to 7.1.2, where you'd least expect it, is a slender button on the web gallery dialog box: "Show Advanced," and we all know that means good things for Jeff and his poor pictures. There are two new options in the Advanced section: a checkbox to hide the title of the gallery on your .Mac galleries page (handy for those who have a photography 'hobby,' nudge nudge say no more), and a choice between optimized and actual-size photos for downloading. Huzzah!

If you've got a web gallery that could benefit from higher-quality download files, try the new setting and let us know your results.

Thanks Jeff

Yesterday, we outlined just a few of the reasons we've become disenchanted with .Mac, focusing on mail, storage space, calendaring and synchronization. Today, we're going to look at what could be .Mac's dramatic resurrection. Like a Phoenix from the ashes, we all know that .Mac will rise again, better than ever before (because Steve and Co. just can't let it stagnate forever, right?). We're going to avoid the usual and more obvious .Mac wish-list items in this post, like increased storage space, a speedier iDisk, reliable synchronization and so on, and focus on all new, would-be features that could really knock our geeky socks off.

Read on, after the jump.

You've just got your first Photocast all ready in iPhoto, and you want to email a bunch of your friends and let them know all about it. However, you vaguely remember that some RSS readers don't support photocasts and you want to warn people in the email announcement, but the built in email text doesn't do that.

What's a photocaster to do?

If you're Rob Griffiths you delve into some program files, change the default to something you like, and write a post about it.

So you want to take part of the photocasting fun but you don't have a copy of iPhoto installed? Then check out RadicalBreeze's PictoGrab. It lets you subscribe to photocasts published with iPhoto '06. Just identify the feed you're interested in, designate a folder to hold the contained images and you're all set. You can also use PictoGrab to quickly grab all of the photos from a website, like a photoblog.

PictoGrab costs $14.95 and requires Mac OS 10.4 or later. A free demo is available.

I've been playing around with the new photocasting feature of iPhoto '06 recently. Sadly, no one in my family has a copy of iLife '06, so I'm unable to take part of the fun. Not wanting to be left out, I've grabbed the RSS feeds of some of my Flickr contacts to add to iPhoto. It worked...kind of.

For some reason, the Flickr feeds only display a user's ten most recent photos. Dave Chartier and I were messing around with this the other night, deep in the hermetically sealed TUAW offices, and we confirmed this suspicion when he updated his own Flickr pool (to which I had subscribed. Scary thought). You can try it out by subscribing to our "Rigs of the Day" Flickr feed [link].

Subscribing to our TUAW news feed [link] pulls the twenty most recent photos from our posts, which is kind of weird because it leaves you with a bunch of out-of-context images.

When publishing a photocast, your outgoing images end up in web/sites/iPhoto/ on your iDisk, and the images from subscribed photocasts land in home/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Data on your Mac (I'm glad to see that iPhoto's method of arranging its library is no longer a labyrinth of nested folders).

It's definitely a cool thing, and if I were using it for its intended purpose (the grandparents in Florida) I'd probably love it. Are you publishing/subscribing to any 'casts?

MacOSXHints has published a simple refresher tip for subscribing to photocasts with Firefox. If you've already tried it, you've been met with a .Mac error page, telling you that your browser isn't compatible with photocasts URLs, and it offers an alternate URL that begins with "web.mac.com." All you need to do to still subscribe to the photocast in Firefox is go to Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks, then chose File > New Live Bookmark and enter the new "web.mac.com" photocast URL. Granted, this is just like entering any other RSS feed to subscribe to in Firefox, but hopefully this helps clear up any confusion some users have been experiencing with all this RSS/photocast terminology re-branding.

While Apple might have coined the term "photocast" (at least I never heard it until Macworld this year), an RSS feed containing images is certainly nothing new. Fortunately, iPhoto 6 knows this, and you can easily subscribe to non-.Mac photocasts simply by using File > Subscribe to Photocast and entering the URL of your favorite photocast. Try our TUAW Flickr feed on for size.

The MacOSXHints post where I found this mentioned they had errors the first time they tried a couple feeds, but they wound up behaving on a second try. For the record though, our Flickr feed behaved just fine for me in iPhoto 6 on my PowerBook.