Saturday, January 22, 2005

iPhoto 5.0 Review

I was ecstatic to hear that iPhoto 5 was going to be able to handle video clips and would have nested folders, I went out and bought it right away. I was recently carousing the market for a program that could organize all those little video clips, so I was glad to hear a program I would probably end up with anyway had it.

So here's what I dig about the program:
  • Ability to handle video
  • Nested folders
  • When you hold down the option key, the Rotate button switched from one way to the other. No more triple-clicking to get a pic the way you want it.
  • You can list the number of pics in a folder or album via a preference selection.
I'm not sure if the last two are new or if I just never noticed them before, but they're welcome improvements.

I did have some problems with it, however.
  • Those weird corrupted files from my past upgrade continue to cause problems. They made the program take so long that I thought it had crashed. (It was actually just taking forever.)
  • The photo in the edit view appeared in the wrong place, partially covering the folder pane of the window. This happened twice in a row and then I couldn't get it to happen again.
And as usual I have a list of suggestions for improvement...

Make videos viewable without launching Quicktime
If Safari can do it, iPhoto should be able to too.

Allow encryption
We've got some pretty personal pics from the birth of my daughter and my wife wouldn't be to happy to hear if someone chanced upon them while looking at our pics in iPhoto. (And this kind of things goes double for all those porn hounds out there.) iPhoto should be able to password protect folders, albums, smart albums, rolls and the individual files as well. If a folder, album, smart album or roll is protected, all files within (and all previous versions of the files if they exist) should be protected as well, no matter where else they can be found, ideally including in the Finder.

Mark as private option
This would be ann addition to the meta-data that's already there. This could be encrypted as well, but the main thing I'm thinking of using it for is preventing unintentional export. Take the birth pics again... if I put them in an album that's functioning as my daughter's baby book and I want to publish that on the web, it'd be nice if those private pics were skipped. Alternatively, this could be folded into my encryption suggestion above, in that encrypted pics would simply not be published.

More meta-data
Right now a convenient work around to additional meta-data is the comments field. However, I'd like to see a Location, Photographer, and People fields. All three of these could be integrated with Address Book. For instance, with Location, you could type in the name of a business in your Address Book and add it in. Ideally, the Location would look up latitude and longitude based on address, and hopefully digital cameras will incorporate GPS sometime soon.

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