iPhoto '08
August 10, 2007
I’ve been playing around with the new iLife since yesterday (specifically iPhoto, my most used iLife app) and it’s been great!
The app feels much faster than ’06 on my iMac G5, scrolling, editing, importing, it’s all zippy and the experience is much nicer for it. Searching is much better and the new editing features are very welcome, especially for tweaking the shadows and highlights (sharpness is handy too), so hopefully I won’t need to use Photoshop as much as I did previously to touch up images.
There are some glaring negatives though…
Firstly, when are people that don’t use .Mac going to get a look in on web galleries and all the other goodies that are .Mac only. My Mum for instance would probably love to be able to make web galleries in such an easy manner to share pictures, but she doesn’t want a .Mac account if she’s already got web-hosting. While doing this wouldn’t really help their .Mac service much, I feel it’s better for the end user to have a choice.
Something else that irks me is events (or should I say rolls on steroids). This is a new feature in iPhoto that is supposed to help you manage your photo’s more efficiently by grouping images from the same day (or week) into events. It’s a great idea, being able to import images from my camera and have them automatically grouped so I can just name the event, great!
However… there’s a caveat to this, everything has to be an event and I mean everything (see the image to the right, 1 image (a wallpaper no less) is somehow an event). I like to use iPhoto to manage my desktop wallpapers and to store images in a sort of scrap book for design inspiration. When I import new images to put in these albums they also become events. Even if there’s only one image!! You can’t remove these events either without deleting the images contained in them, and it’s not possible to remove an image from an event unless you’re deleting it (completely) or putting it in another event.
In my view this is a HUGE oversight on Apple’s part.
It’s not the end of the world though. You don’t have to look at the events view if you don’t want too (iPhoto remembers what you were looking at previously on startup) and, in fact, if you ignore the events section entirely you can be fooled into thinking you’re just using an improved version of ’06. The problem is, I (and many others I’m sure) want to use events, but we want the choice of when to use them. An option to disable automatic event creation or at least some way of having “eventless” images would be sufficient for most.
I actually submitted some feedback about this to Apple, if you want to do the same in a bid to get them to do something in a future update, you can choose the option from the iPhoto menu, or just go to this website
Overall though, despite the lack of event control and the continuing support for only .Mac in the online features, this is a pretty solid upgrade, but it’s certainly more evolutionary than revolutionary.
Feedback?
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