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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."
"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.
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 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.