We have Macintoshes at home, and my husband made a CD of photos from iPhoto for my parents. They are not QUITE computer illiterate, and have a PC running Windows 98. They can’t figure out how to display any pictures from the CD. Is it possible? Is there software they need? Or should we give up in despair?
I’m not much more techy myself, and didn’t find anything at iPhoto help or on a google search, so I appreciate any help anyone can give.
What matters is not what program was used to create them but what format they are in. If they are in a common format, such as JPEG, then there are a myriad of programs which can be used. What is the format?
You know, I don’t have any idea. How do I find this out?
iPhoto stores images in whatever format it gets them from the camera; most likely, this will be JPEG format, so you should be good there.
As for the OP, if your husband simply used iPhoto to burn one of his albums to a CD, the pictures will be there – they’re just buried. When iPhoto creates a CD like that, it’s creating it using iPhoto’s own directory structure. There’s probably a top-level directory on the CD called “iPhoto Library”; the pictures are inside that folder, buried according to the date of each image.
Example: I have a picture in my iPhoto library, imported from my digital camera as IMG001234.JPG, taken on 12/25/2003. If I use iPhoto to burn an album with that photo to a CD, then the picture will be in “iPhoto Library/2003/12/25/IMG001234.JPG”
Your parents should be able to find the photos on the CD, if they’re willing to dig through the CD’s directory structure a little bit.
OK, we did some digging, and you are right rjung. We did find them. My parents want to be able to look at an array of thumbnails and sort through them that way. They are currently upgrading to Windows 2000 (they don’t want to be hasty) and will see if there is an application included with that. If not, they will buy some kind of photo software.
Thanks for the help, both of you.
If you just want to produce a CD full of images (without the iPhoto library cruff), do this:
That will gracelessly plop all of your images on the CD, in the top-level directory, easy for technologically-challenged parents to use. 
In a related vein, the Mac rumor mill says that MacWorld Expo in San Francisco (1/6/2004) will feature new-n-improved versions of Apple’s “iLife” suite; maybe there will be a new version of iPhoto that will address this minor issue.
If they had Windows XP, you could just have them open the CD in Windows Explorer and choose View > Thumbnails to see thumbnails of all the pictures on the disc (assuming you used rjung’s method of burning a disc. They could also do a View > Filmstrip to see a row of thumbnails on the bottom of the screen and a much larger version of a pic they click on.
Since they’ll probably be confused with the 98 > 2000 upgrade anyway you might consider skipping a step and going 98 > XP. Not much point in going to 2000 with XP here these days.
Actually, this would make sense. However, they are getting my sister’s old PC for free, so there is no chance that they will actually pay money to get a current operating system. My father claims that by being the polar opposite of “early adapters,” they are spared errors and patches, and get everything cheaply. Missing out on basic features doesn’t seem to bother them.
Parents. What can you do? 