Fri, 20 Jul 2012 Macworld Masterclass: Share your iPhoto masterpieces with the world

Once you've lovingly polished your photos to perfection using iPhoto's image editing tools, you'll want to show them off. And whether you're uploading party shots to Facebook, displaying your arty images on Flickr or sharing photos from a family barbecue with relatives, iPhoto offers quick ways to handle the task.

It even offers slideshow options for displaying your adventures on your TV or iPad as a less-than-subtle way of awing your dinner party guests, and a way of beaming photos wirelessly to other devices you've paired with your iPad.

As with so many iPhoto features, these exporting and sharing tools fall some way short of being fully intuitive – getting familiar with them is just slightly more fiddly than you might expect given Apple's mastery of the user interface in other apps and devices. Once you've got the hang of them, though, you'll find a quick and powerful set of features that make light work of batch-handling your photos and sharing them with ease.

More iPhoto tutorials

As recently featured in iPad & iPhone User, we have a series of seven tutorials covering different aspects of iPhoto for the iPhone and iPad. This superb app will make editing your photos a dream.

1. Master Crop and Rotate

2. Alter your photos exposure

3. Manipulate colour balance

4. Retouch images

5. Get the look with iPhoto effects

6. Get your photos organised

7. Share your masterpieces with the world

Vital Info

Device: iPad
Difficulty: Beginner
Time required: 10 mins

What you need:

iOS 5.1 or later
iPhoto (£2.99)

Sharing photos on Facebook, Flickr or Twitter is straightforward: choose a single image for Twitter, or upload batches to Facebook or Flickr. If you're already logged into one of these services on your iPad this process is a breeze – but we things became glitchy and slow if you needed to sign in from within the app.

Once you've picked how you want to export your photos, it's time to choose which images to upload. Tapping 'Selected' uploads only the image that's currently in your main screen, while 'Flagged' batch-uploads all images you've previously flagged. Tap 'Choose' to pick individual images or a range of consecutive ones from the sidebar, and then 'Next'.

The first time you upload to Facebook from iPhoto, a menu offers control over privacy settings – if you'd prefer to keep your photos for you and your friends, this is the time to say so. There's no option beyond this point for adding captions, so make you've labelled your photos. Uploading can be very slow for high-res images.

Beaming is one of iPhoto's more pleasingly space-age tools: it enables you to transfer images directly to a linked device that also has iPhoto – so you could carry out a rough colour adjustment on your iPhone and then transfer it to the iPad for more detailed work. Activate Beaming in the Settings menu of the homescreen.

Journals are themed photo collections designed to upload to iCloud, exported to iTunes or viewed as slideshows. Icloud offers you the ability to publish your Journal to its own webpage, for sharing with friends and family – although it's worth noting that as long as your journal is live, anyone with the link can view them.

And finally for a very retro step: what if rather than a whizzy online journal or a tweeted snapshot, you want some actual shiny photos, to put in a card or carry around in your wallet? If you've already got an AirPrint-enabled printer, this is simple – and if not, try Collobos's FingerPrint software for wirelessly printing from your iPad.