Preview doesn't do the obvious...

Question

I am trying to set up a simple presentation of a series of images.
I can create a slideshow of them in Preview but can not save the slideshow. It would have been obvious to let you save them as a QuickTime movie or print them to a multi-page pdf file. No way.
In fact this has lead me to waste an entire day unsuccessfully chasing apps to let me do this simple task.
Quicktime is crude beyond belief and failed to create a slideshow with a large number of files. It wasn't even graceful in its failure, it just went through the motions and produced no file.
I tried several times, hunting through my desktop and HDs trying to find possible places it had dumped them, to no avail.
Keynote makes me drag each file into a tailor made file and then hand place & adjust each image. It won't even let me bring in the files unless I go via iPhoto which is itself clumsy and quite confusing in its organisation style. The alternative is to drag in 1 file from the desktop, create a new page & drag in 1 file from the desktop etc. Imagine doing this for 100s of images!
iPhoto only allows 3 sizes for exported movies, none of which match my file sizes and is excruciatingly slow and seems to hang at the end with a perpetually spinning beachball.
Besides I hate having to take things into iPhoto as it creates yet more duplicates of my files, in places I have trouble locating and eats up my bootdrive.
iMovie creates huge files, blowing everything up into ridiculously large sizes.
Pages has basically the same problems as Keynote with some extra gotchas thrown in.
So much for iLife which seems to consider Hidden Features = Intuitive User Interface.
I am now going through a dozen 3rd party apps all of which also fail to deliver the goods.
How hard can this be for a simple slideshow?
Beaut iMac G5 2Ghz + G4 400 AGP upgraded to G4 1000 that bombs all the time   Mac OS X (10.4.6)  

Answer 1

Peter
I have done all that. Next time I imported photos from my camera it stuck them back into the original iPhoto Library Folder on my bootup drive. By the time I noticed, I had a lovely shemozzle of some in one location and some in another with no clean way of sorting them out.
If you launch iPhoto with the external HD disconnected, it will create a library in the default position. A simple habit to get into is to hold down the option key when launching iPhoto and forcing yourself to choose the library each time, especially if you occasionally launch the app with the HD not available. Works for iTunes too.
As for all the rest there is nothing flagging whether a particular file has or hasn't been copied, or is merely linked,
There's nothing to flag. This is a one time decision. Either you want to Copy the Files to the iPhoto Library Folder or you don't. If you do, leave iPhoto in it's default settings, otherwise change the option at Preferences -> Advanced.
or you are dealing with an edited copy, or there is no edited copy and that is it.
The iPhoto Window always shows you the most recent version of the pic. If you can't recall whether you've previously edited it, simply right-click on it. If Revert To Original is available, it's been previously edited. If not, it hasn't. (Or a quick glance at the View menu will tell you the same thing.)
It is a mess which you are supposed to leave as an all or nothing or take extensive notes in a notebook attached to your monitor and consult before you do anything drastic.
I have 35 gigs of pics and no notebook. Of course, iPhoto is not for everybody. Many people prefer a simple image viewer as opposed to a Photo Organiser.
I can get my head around iTunes (even when it makes repeated linking errors) but iPhoto is a black cat tied up in a sack in a locked trunk in the bottom of the basement with the bulb burned out.
You do realise that both apps are databases, and like any database they require that you manipulate the data from within the app rather than through the finder. The good news is that pretty much anything you need to do can be achieved from within the apps. There's a very helpful community over at the iPhoto discussions.
Regards
TD