Do you like iPhoto?

[Saladinos]

I've never liked iPhoto. The interface is full of graphics and lacking in utility. It makes organising your photos a chore.

Question is - on the whole, do you think iPhoto is a good application? Is it intuitive enough, is it well-designed, do the features satisfy you?

 

[dogtanian]

I've never liked iPhoto. The interface is full of graphics and lacking in utility. It makes organising your photos a chore.

Question is - on the whole, do you think iPhoto is a good application? Is it intuitive enough, is it well-designed, do the features satisfy you?

I must admit I do enjoy using iPhoto. It is perfectly suited to my requirements as a basic viewer/photo compiler/editor.

I have Aperture for anything else.

If there were any improvements that could be made I'd say it could be a bit faster, especially moving between the full screen edit mode and window mode. In fact it actually crashed last week doing so.

But perhaps I just like the pretty visuals, I must admit I do like a fancy interface and photo skimming is v useful...

 

[r.j.s]

iPhoto does what I need it to, but it could be faster (I only have about 6,000 photos).

 

[duncyboy]

It's lovely.

 

[Sesshi]

I've never liked iPhoto. The interface is full of graphics and lacking in utility. It makes organising your photos a chore.

Question is - on the whole, do you think iPhoto is a good application? Is it intuitive enough, is it well-designed, do the features satisfy you?

All true, but it does what little it does very accessibly - and that is the whole point. People who have never got the hang of functionally better apps for example can be getting up and running in no time because there are absolutely no intimidating elements of the way it works.

I do the vast majority of my editing in Windows / CS3 / Lightroom but I still shift all of my photos to iPhoto on one of my machines for quick and dirty stuff regarding printing which other apps don't do as well.

 

[sir42]

I do like iPhoto. Although I wish it had a few more features a la Photoshop Express. Namely, combining images, group shots, and removing elements or people from photos.

And yes, it could be a little speedier.

 

[Saladinos]

I was thinking of making a photo browser, since I personally don't like iPhoto. Here's a (clearly unfinished) mockup. It looks like there's a lot of wasted space, because the iTunes window I made it from was big, and because I haven't added the other metadata to the list (album, tags, rating...etc)

The toolbar would include Mail.App-style buttons to bring a picture in to edit mode. You'd also have a "by album" filter option. You could also create slideshow playlists, possibly exporting them to iMovie.

"By Location" would group items in to collapsable items, showing either the country they were taken in, or the city. Country would have a flag on each item, city would have a landscape silhouette. Geotag information would be analysed to determine the information.

"By People" would group items by person. If the person was in your address book, it would also have an email link to mail them photos (great for sharing photos with your friends).

"By Date" and "By Rating" would also be added. As would a slider for thumbnail size.

Searching would be expanded to give you a filter bar, so you could select all pictures with Ralph in Spain during the last 2 months.

For those of you who like iPhoto - would you prefer it if it was more like this?

 

[mysterytramp]

I had a hard time getting a grasp of all that iPhoto could do until I read David Pogue's Missing Manual. Now I think it does a pretty good job as a photo organizer. I'm intrigued by the book publishing options, but I've never used them (always on my Christmas present to-do list). I do wish it had more photo editing tools. I use Seashore and I'm not much of a photo editor.

But even if it does a pretty good job of organizing photos, that doesn't mean something else couldn't do a better job. Your mockup could be a good start.

mt

(using iPhoto '06)

 

[CWallace]

I admit to disliking it intensely. I keep the old beta of ACDSee 1.7 for Mac on my machine and, when I need more serious power, I fire up Windows via VM and launch ACDSee 9.

 

[iMacBook]

I like iPhoto, but the fact that I don't have my own camera to take pictures of stuff and then upload the images into iPhoto is a real downer. When am able to take pictures, everything works flawlessly.

Only downside to iPhoto is that the images are stored in a package, which is annoying because if you want to view the images outside iPhone, you have to select them, then export them which can be a real pain.

 

[silverz51]

Don't like it but there is no good option.....

I never liked iPhoto after the first burst of enthusiasm when I first started using Macs. I think it's cumbersome to use and I don't like the way it organizes the photos. Anyway, after all is said and done, there is no good alternative option such as Picasa or Fast Stone viewer or any number of free and easy to use apps for windows or linux.

Now, this brings me to a plea for help: I deleted the iPhoto which came with my iMac G5 (1.8 MHz , 512 ram, OS X 10.5.6) and now I realize I need it again (like I said, no good alternatives). I've reloaded the operating system and tried everything I could think, but I've not been able to get the iPhoto back. Camn anyone help me with this?

Thanks

 

[ltldrummerboy]

Don't like it. I would use it if it allowed subfolders. It seems messy to have all your "Events" (read folders) dumped into only a single containing folder. I have all my pictures sorted in Finder by year, month, and sometimes by a special occasion that happened within that month.

 

[rainydays]

I like it, but it's too limited for my needs. I prefer Lightroom.

 

[Cliff3]

I don't use it and I don't like it. I use Lightroom to manage my digital photographs, and the file system and Preview to manage/view miscellaneous graphics and images.

 

[yoyo5280]

its great for managing my photos and basic tweak-ups, but nothing more.

If I were a bigshot photographer guy, id probably hate it.

 

[r.j.s]

Now, this brings me to a plea for help: I deleted the iPhoto which came with my iMac G5 (1.8 MHz , 512 ram, OS X 10.5.6) and now I realize I need it again (like I said, no good alternatives). I've reloaded the operating system and tried everything I could think, but I've not been able to get the iPhoto back. Camn anyone help me with this?

Thanks

It's on the restore disc as Install bundled software.

 

[mkrishnan]

I like iPhoto in that it makes managing photos pretty effortless -- I don't really do much of any editing in it.

When I moved my photos over to a Windows XP computer, though, I started using Picasa, and I have to say I'm at least equally happy with it.

The thing I like least about iPhoto vs. Picasa is the way it lags when it gets a lot of photos in it. Picasa even on a basic computer handles thousands of photos with aplomb....

The only thing I don't like about Picasa vs. iPhoto is that I have to go through an extra step of specifying a folder to import photos into when it syncs off a camera / iPhone, and it seems to crash my iPhone when it tries to delete photos off it.

 

[silverz51]

It's on the restore disc as Install bundled software.

Thanks, I guess you are talking about the original disc that came with the iMac, right? Not the OS X upgrade?...

Will it work with the later OS X? The original disc has OS X10.3.5; the one in the computer now is OS X 10.5.6

Thanks again

 

[mcavjame]

I find it gets better with every iteration. There are things I really like:
- histogram and color correction are simple
- making books is so much easier than using online services
- events has been a great addition to stream lining the number of images you see at once.
- love the quick thumbnail preview by dragging over the event keyphoto

Things I dislike:
- never use the camera to import or delete photos. It simply takes too long
- I hate the way adding photos from cameras that lose their date setting get added to the top and you have to drag them to their chronological position
- no way to fix an incorrect date. You can change it, but iPhoto doesn't care or recognize it.

 

[Matti]

Its not terrible and I can manage with it, but I don't like it very much. Sadly there doesn't seem to be very much of alternatives for it on OSX. I hope Google some day releases that rumored Mac version of Picasa.

(Love my Mac and OSX, but I think that the whole iLife software package is way overrated).

 

[sanPietro98]

I like iPhoto '08. iPhoto 07 and earlier made managing the photos somewhat tedious. But since they added "Events" in the 2008 version, I think it makes managing photos pretty simple.

 

[r.j.s]

Thanks, I guess you are talking about the original disc that came with the iMac, right? Not the OS X upgrade?...

Will it work with the later OS X? The original disc has OS X10.3.5; the one in the computer now is OS X 10.5.6

Thanks again

Correct.

And it will work, you will just have the older iLife.

 

[macrem]

I need to give iPhoto another chance as its been a long time that I have been in the habit of either using Preview for viewing or GIMP for editing.