Ahhh, there’s nothing better on a hot summer day than a tall cool glass of... wait, actually AIR CONDITIONING is better than any tall cool glass of anything... and maybe a pool, but you see, those things don’t fit into what I’m trying to do today so, tall cool glass it is! OR IS IT?

If you happen to be using one of the older plainer themes for iWeb, the blog page image for those have a really nice feature in that they automatically display properly on the excerpts page. Whether you drop in an image that’s landscape or portrait, it displays the entire image in either orientation. Unfortunately, all of the newer themes and a few of the older ones are locked into the landscape orientation. Drop in a landscape pic, you’re fine. Drop in a portrait pic (like the tall cool glass above) and, on the excerpt page, you’ll only see the middle of the picture. If it’s a pic of you and your loved one on the beach, the excerpt image will look like an image of you and your loved one sans heads on the beach. Is there a way around this madness? Yes, but I gotta tell ya, you might not like it. I also gotta tell ya, it involves Preview. So, if you have removed Preview from your system long ago due to irreconcilable differences, this tip isn’t for you. For the rest, read on!

First, the “why”. It’s not because there’s something sinister in those iWeb themes that dislikes heads. It’s just that when they were designed, this omni-orientational ability was not bestowed unto them. To make up for this deficiency, portrait pictures are made to fit into the area to fill the width. Since you can’t fit the height in there without making everyone look REALLY wide, the decision was made to focus on the center. In a few cases, this is a decent thing to work with. In others, the point of taking a photo as portrait is completely lost since the preview no longer shows, say, the shell on the sand AND the sun in the sky... just the ocean’s horizon.

Now, the “what”. What we’ve got to do is fake that area into thinking your photo is much wider than it actually is. The thinking is, since it has no problem displaying landscape, if we can MAKE it landscape, we’d have our problem solved. Apple’s Time Machine isn’t shipping yet (no going back in time and telling yourself to take a landscape pic), so we can only work with what we’ve got. HERE is where Preview comes in.

Take the picture and drop it into iWeb (or, if you prefer, either of the iWork applications). Then, create a square shape by doing Insert -> Shape -> Rectangle.

In the inspector Metrics pane, set the size of this new shape (which defaults to 100 x 100) to 40 x 30. Then, click the Constrain proportions checkbox. This is to give us a shape in the right dimensions to use WITH our image. Now, in the Metrics pane, you want to examine the Height of the picture you dropped in. If it’s already the right size, just take note of the number. If not, resize it until it’s the size you want, then make a note of the new number. Now, go back to the rectangle you created earlier, and, in the Metrics pane, change it’s Height to the same as the picture’s. Click your picture again, move it to the front using the Forward button at the bottom of the iWeb window, then use the automatic guides to snap the picture to the middle of the shape (when you see the blue lines crossing in the middle, you’ve got it). Now your “portrait” is a landscape picture... with some extra stuff. Let’s get rid of the “extra” by clicking on the rectangle shape, and in the Inspector under the Graphic tab, set the Fill and Stroke to None. You won’t see it, but it’s still there (and you’ll see it’s control handles if you click the area to the left and the right of the picture). And now, the part you’ve been waiting for, say it with me, PREVIEW PASSTHRU!

Hold down Shift and click the picture and your invisible background in order to select both. Copy, Open Preview, Command-N, Command-S, and choose to save as PDF. Take that file and drag and drop it into your placeholder (adjusting the mask as necessary) and then take a look at your main blog page. Since we’ve essentially told iWeb that this is a wide picture, the entire picture is shown (and, due to the invisible background, you see nothing but the picture). The part you might not like is that the image is so small. We can’t change the size and shape of that area, so while you do see your image in all it’s glory, it’s glory is just slightly diminished. I’ve posted “before and after”s of a few 1.0 and 1.1 themes here to give you an idea. Now, your images won’t be quite as thin as the glass I’m using as an example, but there will be some background showing in the frame.

It’s a compromise, for sure, but still a bit better than having pictures of people with their heads cut off. Heads which, I’m sure, would MUCH rather be a part of the picture...

And having a nice drink!