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by Adam C. Engst <ace@tidbits.com>
For me, the commitment of writing a book goes beyond
the initial effort because I end up being linked with the book's topic
for what feels like the rest of time. When that happened with the Internet
and Eudora, I wasn't bothered, since the Internet and Eudora are parts
of my everyday life.
I was unsure of how the relationship would work out with iPhoto after
writing iPhoto 1.1 for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide, since as much
as I liked and used iPhoto 1.0 and then 1.1, I don't take enough photos
to need to use the program on a daily basis. But the real problem with
committing wholeheartedly to iPhoto was that the program had some glaring
holes with sharp edges, and I couldn't really argue with the people
who complained about its performance, its haphazard interface, or the
way many features seemed to stop short of what users wanted.
So although I didn't know iPhoto 2 would be announced Macworld Expo,
I wasn't surprised because iPhoto 1.1 so clearly needed a significant
upgrade. Is iPhoto 2 the upgrade I and so many others were hoping for?
With last week's release, we can look at the program in enough detail
to decide whether the new version breaks new ground or is merely a welcome
update.
http://www.apple.com/iphoto/
Importing
I haven't seen any changes to the way iPhoto imports pictures, which
is unfortunate, because it means iPhoto still can't import a selection
of photos from your camera or memory card - it's all or nothing. Since
importing is slow, sometimes you want to import just a few photos without
waiting for or dealing with all the other photos on the card, and importing
sets of photos helps make film rolls more topical. You can still use
Image Capture to simulate this feature, or if you have a memory card
reader, you can import a selection of photos by dragging them into iPhoto
from the Finder.
The solution is clear. Import mode makes little sense now, since the
main display pane shows the current album even when you're importing.
Instead, iPhoto should display thumbnails for the photos on the camera
or memory card in the display pane, and the Import button should be
replaced by two buttons: Import Selected Photos and Import All.
Also unchanged is the way iPhoto declares itself the caretaker of all
your digital photos, filing them away chronologically in the iPhoto
Library folder in your Pictures folder. This approach has been controversial,
since it forces people with long-standing filing systems to give their
photos over to iPhoto or duplicate everything. Many people asked for
iPhoto to work like iTunes, which can manage your MP3 files wherever
they may be located by relying on a reference to the file instead of
the file itself. To be fair, iPhoto is in a slightly different situation,
since you don't generally edit MP3 files, whereas iPhoto must track
original and changed versions of photos. For better or worse, iPhoto
2 sticks with the existing approach, but at least the concern about
iPhoto's collection of photos becoming inaccessible is significantly
reduced by iPhoto 2's new capability to archive photos to CD or DVD.
Organizing
iPhoto's organize mode received both major and minor improvements in
iPhoto 2. Most notable is the new Keywords window, which replaces the
tremendously awkward controls for assigning and searching for keywords
in iPhoto's earlier versions. It also lifts the restriction on the number
of keywords you can create.
The Keywords window provides a list of keywords; a pop-up menu with
commands for creating, renaming, and deleting keywords; Assign and Remove
buttons; Show All and Search buttons; and a text field for searching
for text in titles and comments. Although the Keywords window is a huge
improvement over the previous interface, it's still weird, with the
Assign and Remove buttons using a different style from the Show All
and Search buttons. And the items in the keyword list have two selection
states - highlighted with the selection color if you've clicked them
and highlighted with gray if they are assigned to the currently selected
photo.
Along with useful new functionality, such as being able search for a
set of photos using keywords and then apply a new keyword to the found
set, Apple also built in some welcome tricks. Double- clicking a keyword
searches for that keyword; Option-double- clicking assigns it to the
selected photos. When you search for a keyword, iPhoto also finds photos
with that keyword in their title or comments, and if you perform a text
search for a word that's also a keyword, iPhoto finds keyworded photos
too.
By moving the keywords interface and the checkboxes for titles, keywords,
and film rolls out of the tool area in organize mode, Apple was able
to eliminate the need for a separate share mode entirely. This is a
big win, since share mode made little sense given that the display pane
continued to show whatever album or book was active. The share tools
now appear in organize mode, making them more easily accessible and
removing complexity from the program. A new View menu lets you toggle
the display of titles, keywords, and film rolls, and lets you arrange
your photos in different ways, with "by Title" being a new
addition.
Editing
Despite having the excellence of Caffeine Software's free PixelNhance
staring them in the face, Apple chose a different route with two new
editing features, Enhance and Retouch.
http://www.caffeinesoft.com/
Most film photo processors manipulate pictures slightly when printing
because they've learned that most customers prefer good- looking photos
to accurate reproductions of the original. So they may bump up the brightness
or increase the saturation of colors in an attempt to produce a more
pleasing photo. That's exactly what iPhoto's Enhance button tries to
do, but just as with the photo processors, it sometimes screws up. From
what I can tell, it adjusts brightness and contrast, sometimes for just
parts of the photo, and it can improve colors, such as by warming up
skin tones or changing blue-tinted snow to white. It may be doing more,
but Apple hasn't said exactly what. In my testing, it improved about
half of the photos, made no appreciable difference for a few, made most
of the rest slightly worse, and royally screwed up several (so be prepared
to take advantage of iPhoto's multiple Undos). In short, it's always
worth trying Enhance, since it can help some photos, but don't assume
that what it does will be better than the original or what you can do
with iPhoto's still-awkward brightness and contrast controls or PixelNhance's
color correction tools.
I've recently discovered a feature that's in both iPhoto 1.1.1 and 2.0
that simplifies comparing the results of the Enhance button with the
original. Press the Control key after clicking Enhance (or making any
editing change), and iPhoto flashes back to the way the photo looked
before the change. Let up on the Control key and you're seeing the edited
version again. It's a fabulously quick way to see before and after images.
Where Enhance works on the entire photo, you use the Retouch brush on
very small parts of the image. Speaking as someone with a ton of kid
photos, it's easier to clean a photo using Retouch than it is to hassle
your child to wipe that bit of jelly off his face. Retouch blends the
colors around the area you're fixing well, but can't handle large areas.
When I tried to erase a piece of paper in a shirt pocket with Retouch,
it ended up looking like a large dust bunny instead.
I've also learned two other useful editing tricks that still exist in
iPhoto 2. When you're working with a constrain rectangle in Edit mode,
press the Option key to switch it from portrait to landscape, which
is easier than switching the selection in the Constrain pop-up menu.
And if you want to switch to None in the Constrain menu briefly, press
the Command key while you're dragging.
Sharing
When it comes to sharing photos, Apple has given us a number of welcome
enhancements, although many leave me wanting more.
If you like printing photos on your own printer, you may appreciate
the two new styles: N-Up and Sampler. N-Up lets you fill a page with
2, 4, 6, 9, or 16 images, either of the same photo or of a set of selected
photos, and is quite similar to the Contact Sheet style. The Sampler
style comes with two templates. The first displays a single large photo
and two smaller ones on a single page, and the second arranges five
smaller pictures around a single large photo. The effect is not unlike
printing pages from iPhoto's book layouts, but it's nowhere near as
flexible as Econ Technologies $20 Portraits & Prints, particularly
with their $10 Portraits & Prints Template Maker.
http://econtechnologies.com/site/Pages/pnp_overview.html
http://econtechnologies.com/site/Pages/pnptm_overview.html
iPhoto's Slideshow feature has been enhanced by integrating it with
iTunes. When you want to pick a song to play with a slideshow, you now
have access from within iPhoto to all your iTunes music, complete with
a search function. Each photo album can even have its own song attached.
Annoyingly, iPhoto's slideshow doesn't even notice a second monitor.
But far worse is the painfully obvious fact that a slideshow can still
have only a single song associated with it, and that song will repeat
as necessary if the slideshow lasts longer than the song. iPhoto should
let users pick multiple songs or select iTunes playlists - that would
be real integration with iTunes. If you're looking for other sounds
for slideshows, check out the $50 SmartSound Movie Maestro, which helps
you build professional soundtracks for movies and slideshows (but read
the help for instructions on use with iPhoto).
http://smartsound.com/moviemaestro/
The embarrassing limitation in iPhoto 1.1.1 of being able to send photos
via email only with Apple's Mail has now been lifted, and iPhoto 2 uses
the same technique as Simon Jacquier's free iPhoto Mailer Patcher: a
custom AppleScript script and icon for each of the supported programs
(America Online, Eudora, Mail, and Microsoft Entourage). Simon has updated
iPhoto Mailer Patcher, letting you use iPhoto 2 with Emailer, Mailsmith,
Outlook Express, PowerMail, and QuickMail Pro. You must still pick your
preferred email client from iPhoto's Preferences window rather than
it picking up your default email client from the Internet preference
pane.
http://homepage.mac.com/jacksim/software/
Ordering prints and books, and uploading to .Mac HomePage albums hasn't
changed significantly, but new among the share tools is a .Mac Slides
button that uploads the selected photos to your iDisk so others can
view them as a screensaver using their Screen Effects preference pane
in Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar (choose .Mac, click Configure, and enter the
.Mac member name - use "adamengst" to see pictures of Tristan).
iPhoto does shrink the size of the uploaded photos to reduce download
time and iDisk space usage, but they still look decent in the screensaver.
The Desktop button does double duty in iPhoto 2, replacing the Screensaver
button in iPhoto 1.1.1. If you select a single photo and click Desktop,
iPhoto makes it the Desktop picture on your main monitor. If you select
multiple photos, clicking Desktop sets those photos to be a screensaver
slideshow _and_ rotates through them as your Desktop picture. There's
a problem, though. If you want a set of photos to be your screensaver,
reset the Desktop picture to use a single photo or risk having your
Dock crash and relaunch itself on a periodic basis. A future version
of Mac OS X will fix the bug.
iPhoto's integration with the rest of the iLife suite is most obvious
with the iDVD button, which takes your selected photos and sends them
to iDVD for simple creation of a DVD-based slideshow for viewing with
any DVD player. I haven't had a chance to test this yet, but it's a
great idea for a simple way to share a lot of photos via a big screen.
Missing from the share tool buttons in iPhoto 2.0 is an Export button,
but its functionality remains accessible if you select the desired photos
and choose Export from the File menu. Little, if anything, has changed
in the Export tools. Since third-party export plug-ins such as Simeon
Leifer's useful BetterHTMLExport plug-in or El Gato's Toast plug-in
caused problems during the iPhoto 1.0 to 1.1.1 update, I recommend removing
them before updating to 2. A new version of BetterHTMLExport is now
available (as $20 shareware, not freeware), and I suspect an update
to the Toast plug-in will be forthcoming, since it's still useful in
iPhoto 2.
http://droolingcat.com/software/betterhtmlexport/
http://www.elgato.com/freeStuff/toastExport.html
You might wonder why the Toast plug-in retains its utility in iPhoto
2 when there's a Burn button for archiving selected photos and albums
to either CD or DVD. Although iPhoto 2's new capability to archive to
CD or DVD is wonderful, especially for backing up your photos (it even
shows you how much space the selected photos will take on the destination),
it creates an iPhoto Library folder on the disc and retains iPhoto's
chronological organization within that folder. iPhoto 2 can display
the contents of those discs in its album pane (complete with a hierarchical
view of albums you had selected when you burned the disc), but you wouldn't
want to send the disc to a friend without iPhoto. It's great for friends
with iPhoto, though, since they can just pop the discs in, view the
contents in iPhoto, and copy files into their Photo Library albums for
editing or rearranging into books.
Archiving may be the most important new feature in iPhoto 2 because
it reduces any worry that iPhoto will go south, forcing you to extract
your precious photos from iPhoto's hierarchical folder structure manually.
I've kept a set of photos outside iPhoto for safety until now, but this
feature made me sufficiently comfortable to commit all future photos
just to iPhoto. It also makes me sorry that my iBook has only a CD-ROM
drive, since I'd probably back up irreplaceable vacation photos while
traveling if it had a CD-RW drive.
Archiving, particularly to CD-RW media, can also replace the clumsy
workaround for merging the work you do in iPhoto on your laptop while
traveling with your main iPhoto Library back home. Instead of exporting
sets of photos, transferring those to the desktop Mac, and importing
again, you can now burn a CD of your vacation snapshots and copy them
back to your main iPhoto Library, retaining all titles and keywords.
A better future approach would rely on Apple's iSync.
http://www.apple.com/isync/
Still clumsy, though, is sharing a single iPhoto Library between two
users on the same machine or between two Macs over a network (don't
even think about doing it without at least 100Base-T Ethernet between
the two computers). Brian Webster's free iPhoto Library Manager still
works with iPhoto 2 and remains the best way to manage multiple libraries
and to share libraries. When sharing on the same machine, make sure
to store your iPhoto Library folder in your Shared folder, set the permissions
in the Get Info window for Others to Read/Write, and apply those settings
to enclosed folders if you want to allow editing of images. Again, I'd
like to see Apple use iSync as a way to keep two users' collection of
the same photos in sync, perhaps with a special keyword that identified
which photos should be synchronized.
http://homepage.mac.com/bwebster/iphotolibrarymanager.html
Miscellaneous
iPhoto 2 boasts performance improvements, but there's room for more.
When you're looking at a single photo in the main window (in either
organize or edit mode), iPhoto pre- loads photos on either side of the
current one so moving to the next photo doesn't have to draw a rough
preview first, then refine it a second or two later. Or at least that's
the theory. After a while in iPhoto, this feature often seemed to stop
working, although quitting and relaunching always restored it. Other
actions, such as resizing the iPhoto window, changing the thumbnail
size for thousands of photos, or scrolling through a large Photo Library,
still aren't smooth, even on my dual 1 GHz Power Mac G4 (though they
weren't notably worse on my 500 MHz PowerPC G3-based iBook). The spinning
pizza of death showed up more frequently than I would have liked, but
in defiance of its nickname, it has usually gone away on its own.
That's not to imply iPhoto 2 has been a paragon of stability (not that
1.1.1 was either). It has crashed seven times on me so far, mostly in
relation to importing, which is why I always recommend avoiding the
"Erase camera contents after transfer" checkbox. Upgrading
to iPhoto 2 changes the format of your iPhoto Library, so it's a good
idea to make a backup of both the iPhoto 1.1.1 disk image and your iPhoto
Library in case you feel the need to revert.
Some people will find the addition of AppleScript support particularly
welcome, though I haven't been able to confirm how complete it is. It
looks, for instance, as though you can read the date of a photo via
a script, but you can't change it, something you can do to a single
photo (but not multiple photos) in iPhoto's interface. Since digital
cameras sometimes lose track of the correct date, a script that set
dates for multiple images would be helpful.
http://www.apple.com/applescript/iphoto/
One final comment. iPhoto 2 offers contextual menus of the standard
commands when you Control-click or right-click on photos in organize
or edit mode. The commands are available elsewhere, but the menu can
provide faster access. For instance, you can Control-click a photo and
choose "Edit in external editor" more quickly than you can
toggle iPhoto's preferences.
Overall
iPhoto 2 is a must-have upgrade if you're already an iPhoto user. It's
better than 1.1.1 in every way, and some of the new features, like archiving
and unlimited keywords, make it much easier to give your photo collection
over to iPhoto. As a free download it's particularly worthwhile, and
even as part of the $50 iLife suite, it's a good value if you also need
the other components (iTunes 3, iMovie 3, and iDVD 2) or lack a high
speed Internet connection to ease the 32 MB download.
http://www.apple.com/ilife/
But at the same time, there's much in iPhoto 2 that disappoints. Why
can't slideshows use an iTunes playlist instead of just a single song?
Why can't you download only a subset of photos from your camera into
iPhoto? Why hasn't Apple provided a clean way to share an iPhoto Library
with other users of your Mac? Why can't you edit photo titles underneath
the photo, rather than in the information pane? I'm happy to accept
limitations that are out of iPhoto's scope, such as Photoshop-like editing
tools, but these lapses are so blatant that it's hard to imagine why
they're still missing a year after iPhoto first appeared. Don't get
me wrong, I like iPhoto 2 a lot, and I'm already deep into updating
my iPhoto Visual QuickStart Guide to cover it. It's just frustrating
to see a program with so many hints of greatness dragged down by what
look like sloppy omissions.
Reprinted
with permission from TidBITS. TidBITS has offered more than ten years
of thoughtful commentary on Macintosh and Internet topics. For free
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www.tidbits.com.
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