The uber geeks

iPhoto ‘08 comes with a learning curve

It has been a long time since I’ve written anything about the iLife suite of applications from Apple, but I think it is time I hop back into the habit of jotting down my thoughts about each application.

Let’s start with iPhoto ‘08 and its usability issues. There are a few things about iPhoto ‘08 that has changed from previous versions, which are not all that apparent and are pretty odd to figure out. Maybe if you are someone that has recently begun using iPhoto, or maybe you’ve never used any of the of its predecessors, and so you’ve not had any of these problems - but I have a feeling that anyone that has upgraded noticed these specific issues.

First thing I noticed is that Quick Look is sort of built-in. Now, by default, when you double-click on a photo, and it blows the photo up to fill the preview area, the only want to “get back” to the list of thumbnails is to click on it again or hit the space bar. Unlike Quick Look behavior in other applications, it does not open a new window. In previous versions of iPhoto there was a “done” button. I must have looked around for a whole 2-minutes before I just clicked on the photo. I am not a fan of this method - but I have gotten used to it.

The second thing that I noticed was the calendar view is now “hidden” under the search options. I want to state clearly that now that I’ve found the calendar again, thanks to Justin Taylor via Twitter, I really like this implementation much better than the old one. However, finding it was another issue - since I was used to it being in the info pane.

One of iPhoto’s brand new features is Events. Events is really a great way to store photos since iPhoto “smartly” adds photos taken over a specific duration to an event automatically. Lets say you shoot several hundred photos over the course of a few days. One day you go to a concert, the next to a car show, and the final day is your cats in the sun light through the kitchen window - each of them will be stored as an event. From what I’ve seen so far, iPhoto does a fantastic job of grouping photos together.

There is only one problem. I have better than 35,000 photos that were never grouped into Events in iPhoto. So, it has taken me some time but I’m slowly getting my Events view under control as I’ve been able to begin grouping photos together, splitting other sets apart, and creating events. This is something I’ve always done, mind you, but I was using albums to catalog events. I am not sure how long it will take me to get to the point where I can get rid of my albums and strictly use events, but I’m guessing that won’t happen anytime soon.

Importing photos in iPhoto ‘08 is a little slower, it seems, but it is a joy to use. If you have an iPhone, you’ll find that the first time you import into iPhoto it will do a check of your iPhone’s photo database and the photos you’ve already imported into iPhoto. This takes a very long time. Once it is done though, importing photos from your iPhone is really great. Why? Because iPhoto ‘08 shows you the contents of your memory card, iPhone, camera, or whatever you’re importing from and allows you to choose what to import into your iPhoto library. If you’re patient enough, you could use this as your light box to sift through the crappy photos on your memory card, so you don’t even import them onto your computer. Something I wish that I had since I switched to digital just before the turn of the century.

Conclusion

This is by no means a full review, but I did want to point out a few things that may prove a little weird for those of us that have upgraded from previous versions of iPhoto. Overall this update of iPhoto is worth the price tag without a doubt, and I recommend everyone upgrading.

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