Yes, its a rant, but it really, really does suck. Hear me out.
Yesterday, I upgraded to iPhoto 11. After half an hour installing the iLife 11 suite, I launched iPhoto, which spent the best part of the next hour upgrading the library to the iPhoto 11 format. And once it was done, it spent another 10 minutes in a peculiar, frozen state before returning control to me.
But, lets start off with the positives there are a number of good things about iPhoto 11. The new interface is pretty, Apple simplified iPhoto by replacing the mish-mash of interfaces in previous versions with a series of activity panes Info, Edit, Create, Add To, Share; and gorgeous full-screen views that make full-screen actually useful. My favourite has to be the new Info pane geotagging photos or adding faces can now easily be accessed via the info pane. Unfortunately, thats about it...
First of all, iPhoto 11 is incredibly slow. Okay, the performance of Places and Faces is better than iPhoto 09 though clicking on a location or face still sends iPhoto into another spinning beach ball frenzy, with no escape; but the thought of waiting ages and ages just to watch a slideshow, make a card, or make a book simply means that it isnt something Id do very often.
And yes, I am running iPhoto on a pokey 2006-era Core Duo MacBook Pro, with just 2 GB of RAM; and yes, I do have some 55,000 photos (37 GB) in the Photo Library. But thats no excuse for the poor performance of iPhoto if iTunes can successfully manage 15 days (40 GB) of music plus another 13 GB of films (and then some) without grinding to a complete halt, why cant iPhoto?
With iPhoto 09, Apple modified iPhoto so that what you saw in iPhoto no longer matched the underlying folder structure. For example, if you renamed an event from say, Summer Holidays to Summer Fun, it would still be called Summer Holidays when you looked at the underlying folder structure in Finder. With iPhoto 11, Apple has gone one step further photos imported wont even retain their original folder name, and instead, Apple would file these folders inside by the date and time that it was imported. So, if you imported your Summer Holidays folder on the 22nd of October 2010, your Summer Holidays photos will show up in ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Masters/2010/10/22/20101022-195210/ it hardly makes sense!
Of course, some argue that end users would never see this and allow iPhoto to do whatever it wants but thats missing the point: Its all right and well when iPhoto works correctly, but when the database becomes corrupted, users will lose data. And Im speaking from experience here with the upgrade from iPhoto 09 to iPhoto 11, the import was completed successfully, but I nevertheless lost around 20 smart albums nestled in folders created in iPhoto 09 with no error messages whatsoever. I had to recreate them from scratch.
Again, a comparison with iTunes can be made. In iTunes, if a user selected Keep iTunes Media folder organised, iTunes would ensure that any song will be stored in ~/Music/iTunes Media/Music/Artist/Album/Song.m4a and if you renamed the artist name, the underlying folder structure would be modified accordingly. Why cant iPhoto do the same?
Its one thing to make things simple for end users but another thing totally to make things appear simple to end users, but is a convoluted mess in the background. And thats what iPhoto has become.
I really want to like iPhoto Im still using iPhoto mainly because of the integration with iOS I like how Faces and Places on iPhoto show up on my iPhone, and no competitors come close to this. And, iPhoto remains better than the competitors: Windows Live Photo Gallery under Windows 7 is probably a close second, but the latest (2011) version cant read my networked library in VMWare Fusion; while Picasa looks more and more dated, despite the addition of features like Places and Faces. However, unless Apple sorts out iPhoto by making it MUCH faster, and ideally, a sensible underlying folder structure (a complete re-write for iPhoto 12, anyone?), I find it hard to recommend iPhoto.
(Im really enjoying iMovie 11 and GarageBand 11, and would recommend them as an upgrade )
