iPhoto ’09
iPhoto was the second programme in Apple’s iLife suite to be introduced, and therein lies the problem that Apple face with iPhoto. It’s a mature programme, one that has settled into a useful — valuable, even — tool for many users. It provides, and has done for several versions — a decent, and quite capable, array of organisational tools for amateur snapsters, and even has a thing or two to offer to professional photographers. The problem, then, is this — what do Apple do next?
Unfortunately, Apple have set foot on the path, the long, slippery path, toward feature bloat with iPhoto ’09. The good news is that the things that really matter — the basic functionality, the interface — are essentially unchanged. What Apple have chosen to do is add features that don’t really, well, do very much, no matter how excited Phil Schiller may have been when he introduced them last month at Apple’s Macworld swansong.
Facial recognition
Call it arrogance, call it utterly overarching hubris, but I like to think that I’m better at recognising my wife’s face than my computer is. Even a Mac isn’t going to know Debbie any better than I do; I’m not entirely sure, then, why I need a computer programme to help me identify pictures of the lady I’ve spent the last seven years married to. Yes, it’s an interesting novelty, but the fact remains that the Faces feature of iPhoto ’09 takes so much training that it’s not actually useful. Were it simply a matter of clicking once on a photo and saying “Here — that’s the missus. Go fetch!” then I might be singing a different song right now, but a programme that can’t accurately and reliably differentiate between my wife, my father-in-law and my daughter, or indeed one that thinks that I’m a ballet dancer, doesn’t impress. Maybe in future the software will be able to do a better job of picking out people’s faces, but it’s simply not there yet.
Mapping
A keen traveller, I was excited to see support for geotagging added to iPhoto. I travel, I shoot, I upload to Panoramio, which website offers a decently functional mapping feature. I had long wished for a way of tagging my photos’ EXIF data with latitude and longitude information, but my camera doesn’t have a built-in GPS, so I’ve had to rely on manually tagging my images. iPhoto, then, should have been a boon. It’s not. It does, to be sure, offer a way of adding lat-long data to photos. It also, helpfully, now includes one-click uploading to Flickr and Facebook. Neither of these sites, however, is a geographically-oriented venture; I’ve tried placing my photos in iPhoto’s admittedly elegantly-designed and well-implemented mapping interface, but when I upload tagged images to Panoramio, the geographic data simply isn’t recognised. Once again, a marquee feature that simply disappoints.
Otherwise, little is significantly different in this latest version of iPhoto. Photos are still organised into events, but now each event’s information, including description and, of course, location, can be accessed from a little “i” that appears as you mouse over the event in the Events browser. This would be more useful if it weren’t so glacially slow; as it stands, once again we have a new feature that doesn’t actually work terribly well. The same is true of information for individual photos — more than once I’ve found the animation that accompanies the revealing and hiding of a photo’s or event’s information window has been so slow as to leave me wondering if perhaps the entire application had frozen.
I’m disappointed with the latest version of iPhoto. I was curious about Faces, but couldn’t really describe my reaction as disappointment since I had few real expectations of the feature. Places, on the other hand, was something I’d been wanting in iPhoto for quite some time, and I am very unimpressed with its lack of integration with possible the major online use for it. Had nothing else changed, I would simply have dismissed these features as something that maybe I just didn’t get, but that others would find helpful. But when they start to get in the way of my actual work, then I find myself looking on my shelf for my iLife ’08 installer.
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