At my prodding (so she could take advantage of some other nice features in iLife'06), she recently upgraded to iPhoto6. Shortly thereafter, I she let me know she was not happy about the missing Home Page button. It turns out that this feature was simply removed from iPhoto6 -- it seems Apple wants everyone to run their images through iWeb for web publication. For my mom, though, iWeb is overkill, and it doesn't offer nearly the same number of themes as does the .Mac photo album feature. She doesn't want a full-blown site page, she just wants a nice photo album. Since I felt responsible for her upgrading, I had to come up with at least a workable solution for her. What follows is pretty basic stuff, but if you relied on the Home Page button and lament its passing, read on for the simplest workaround I was able to come up with (alternatives welcome).
At first, I thought this would be a great excuse to create an Automator workflow for my mom to make the process simple. But after spending a few hours on development, I realized that the workflow was actually slower and more complex than the following solution, so I threw it out. In the end, this seems to be simplest way to publish to a .Mac photo album with iPhoto6:
- In iPhoto6, select the photos (or album) that you wish to make into a .Mac photo page.
- Choose File -> Export.
- Set the Size section to 800x600 or 640x480 as you wish (larger images will take longer to upload and use more .Mac disk space, obviously).
- Click Export.
- In the dialog box that appears, click on your iDisk in the sidebar, then click the Pictures folder. This is where .Mac stores the pictures used in photo pages.
- Click New Folder, name the new folder and click Create. This is where the exported images will go.
- Click OK to export the images.
While this method works, and it's not too difficult, it does require using two apps where previously just one was required. I hope Apple will bring back the Home Page button in a future update, but I don't think it will happen...

