iPhoto '08 Crops First, Asks Questions Later

iLife does a great job of managing the digital elements of my life. I primarily use iPhoto, iWeb and iTunes, but I’ll occasionally jump into iMovie and iDVD to bring life to and to share my creations. I put a lot of faith into these applications as I entrust them with my art and to a certain extent, my memories. I have the utmost confidence in the Apple team to only bring the highest-quality applications into my life and I therefore rarely worry about the fact that my content is managed by this iLife monopoly.
When the occasional iLife application hiccup does present itself I remain confident that either Apple will quickly and painlessly resolve the issue or one of my fellow Mac users will find a way around the problem.
When recently working with a client at an in-store consult I was presented with a problem I’d never experienced before. This user couldn’t figure out, after having upgraded to the new iLife ‘08 software, how to print oddly shaped photos in their original orientation and aspect ratio. The print window kept taking the photo and cropping one side or another to fill the thinnest part of the photo to the 8.5×11 page. Annoying if you want to print your whole picture, not just a portion of it. Totally stumped, I turned to Apple’s Support and Discussions pages. One quick search within the iPhoto section brought me to the answer, here!

Here’s the solution, thanks to the above discussion forum user:

• Highlight the photo you’d like to print
• Choose “print” from the “file” menu (or click the “print” button)
• Leave all the settings at their default in the drop-down print window, but click the “customize…” button; you’ll be taken to the “printing” page
• Click once on the photo to pop-up a zoom-in or out slider and click on the hand icon to choose how you’d like the image cropped
• Here comes the big tip: If you don’t want iPhoto to crop the photo at all, right-click (or hold down the “ctrl” key while clicking) on the photo itself and choose “fit photo to frame size” from the menu
  Problem solved!