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Apple Updates iPhoto
hrbrmstr writes "Apple released an update to iPhoto, bringing it up to version 4.0.2. From the horse's mouth: 'iPhoto 4.0.2 addresses minor issues with Smart Albums and European books, and provides notification when new versions of iPhoto are available.' Get it from Software Update or from Apple support."
What are you talking about? iPhoto has fixed minor issues with smartbooks and european books. How can you not think this is interesting news?
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
iPhoto isn't so much a photo manipulation tool as a way to store and organize your pictures. The iPhoto directory is in ~/Pictures. There is a command in iPhoto to reveal the pic you're looking at in the Finder, so that you can edit in Photoshop or other full-featured editor.
The default behaviour of iTunes is the same: double-click a music file, and iTunes will launch and copy the file into ~/Music/iTunes. I used to fight this, and now I kinda like it, because it automatically puts my music files into folders, by artist. The tough part was wrapping my head around the fact that once I have played my music in iTunes, I can trash the original file because iTunes now "owns" its own copy.
IMHO the rationale behind this is that tools like iTunes and iPhoto are better ways to organize media by its specific metadata than the all-purpose Finder can provide. The Finder is not geared to show us song lengths, or to create playlists, photo albumbs or music CDs.
I agree with you, of all the Apple programs I've used, this one just did not sit right with me. Safari and iTunes are fine applications, and I have very few gripes with them. But iPhoto just frustrated me when I used it back when it came out.
It was slow, and put the photos deep into a hierarchy, which made them a pain in the ass to find when I wanted to manipulate them in Photoshop. And since most of the photos I take are intended to be used for things other than just having around on my computer to be looked at occasionally, iPhoto is more of a hassle that it is a convenience. I just wish I had a better way of organizing my photos than I do now, somewhere in between the complex organization of the way iPhoto does it, and trying to manage them myself (wherein I usually end up with duplicates of photos because I usually don't delete the photos on the camera after I retrieve the photos from it that I need).
Basically, iPhoto is good for people who like amassing large albums of photos of their dog, kids, etc. But it's needlessly time consuming and frustrating if you need to do any serious digital photo editing.
Alas, the method it uses to provide that notification is an automatic slashdot submission, so there's more of this sort of story to come.
Where's the new iTunes though? I'd like one that isn't broken.
Please don't post replies saying that your iTunes isn't broken, I know most people's isn't, but mine is and it's not my computer's fault (unless you want to blame it for running Windows XP, which you probably do)
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
iPhoto lets you specify any external editor you want to edit the photos with. It's not designed to be a serious photo editing application; it's designed to organize your photo library with lots of metadata. The newer versions do a very good job of this.
I bought iLife at the beginning of last year, as I really wanted iDVD. At the time, iLife included iTunes 3, iPhoto 2, iMovie 3, and iDVD 3. I missed the free upgrade by a matter of weeks. Since then, I paid for the upgrade to Panther, and renewed my .mac account. With the exception of iTunes, all that software is now obsolete. I would like to have the current versions, but there is no upgrade path. I am not interested in Garage Band, so it just doesn't seem worth the money with everything else I paid Apple this past year. There is no upgrade path to the current versions, short of buying a new copy (at full price) of iLife '04. This is very frustrating to me. At the time, I understood having to pay for iLife just to get iDVD, as there are licensed codecs that cost Apple money (I already owned the rest). I can understand charging for Garage Band (it's new). iTunes is free. I paid for Jaguar and Panther without any regret. I know I am whining, but I really wish Apple was more generous with their upgrade paths for their consumer products. Really I am a MacFanBoi, but this is the second worse thing Apple has done in recent years (the first was charging for .mac -- after heavily advertising it a free feature of OS X).
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!
I am somewhat confused about the commotion about knowing what the file struture is. The reason I use Iphoto is so I don't have to know the file structure. You import you pictures and then by using albums, keywords, ect you can organize. Great stuff.
To use an external editor I right click and choose open in external editor. I can even open multiple pictures by selecting more than one. I make my edits in Photoshop Elements and save them. The data is saved and refresed in iphoto. If I dont like it I can ALWAYS revert back to the original import version (under photos revert to original).
I can backup my library by exporting what I want. So simple.
The Apple discussion boards are talking that it's been pulled due to some issues.
If you don't have an iTools login you can still view most everything in the Apple Discussion area.