iLife ‘08: Part 1 - iPhoto - a Bounty of Surprises

The next iteration of iLife finally arrived last week, and it provides many great improvements beyond those advertised by Apple. Over the next few weeks I’ll review all of the iLife apps. Today it’s iPhoto.

iPhoto in particular has many unadvertised new features. In fact, what’s best about iPhoto is not the features you’ve seen, but the ones you haven’t seen. This surprises me of Apple who usually don’t miss a good marketing opportunity.

Advertised new features
Here’s the features Apple is telling you about:

Organize by Events: Now iPhoto automatically organizes your library by Events, based on dates.

The automation only extends to dates and time intervals between photo groups, and it doesn’t name your events, so it’s a bit of a stretch trumpeting it as automatic.

That said, I love Events. Okay, yes, it is just Rolls renamed, but it is on steroids and gives me features I’ve long wanted.

Whereas previously you had no control over where a Roll began or ended, or what photos were in a Roll, with Events you can split and merge them.

I immediately found I was taking the extra few minutes to split new photo uploads into their respective Events. And it certainly pays off in the Event view.

In your existing library, any unnamed Rolls will be named as “Untitled Event”. If you didn’t previously name your Rolls, it will be more of a chore to go through your older photos and group them into their correct events.

However, not all photos are part of an event, are they? For instance, many people, as well as taking pictures of birthdays and holidays, also like to take pictures of interesting objects and scenery. So what Event name do you give those dozen butterfly photos you took yesterday? Therefore you will sometimes have to ignore the fact this new grouping method is called Events, and just think of them as groups or sets.

There has been some discussion in the Apple forums about whether Events are good or bad. I reckon they’re great, but way under utilized.

A tip: Despite iPhoto showing you an Events’ date and time in the info panel, unlike photos, you can’t edit it there. Instead, you select the event and go to “Adjust Date and Time” in the Photos menu.

Another new organization feature mentioned by Steve is “hiding”. This I have also found very useful. Often we take squillions of pictures of the same thing “because we can”, because we’re not paying for film anymore. But of those squillions, we might only like one or two. Hiding lets you hide all those superfluous photos, thus greatly improve the viewability of your photo library. And that way, you can get them back later if you just happen to need them - which of course you won’t unless you delete them, then you guaranteed to need them.

.Mac Web Gallery: Build a stunning online gallery using .Mac, where visitors can view and download your photos, and add their own photos from a Mac or PC.

I have had a look at Apple’s online demo gallery and tried it myself. It is much slower in real life than in “keynote life”, but is a super cool way to show off your photos online. I wonder how long before Flickr copies it.

Uploading photos to it went okay, although quite slow when the “Allow downloads” option was selected.

Powerful new editing tools: New tools let you edit like a pro and paste a set of adjustments from one photo onto another.

The new editing options let you adjust the highlights, shadows, midtones, the color cast by sampling the neutral grey point and reduce noise.

Considering the various image editing and creation tools scattered throughout Apple’s apps (such as shape and bezier drawing, and Instant Alpha), it’s not unreasonable to think Apple might unify them all into one consumer-level image editing application.

But the best new editing feature by far is being able to copy adjustments from one image to another.

Unified Search: Search your photo library in one place — filtered by name, date, rating, or keyword.

This is a welcome enhancement that certainly makes finding the right photo easier.

New calendars and books: Create new hardcover photo books with customized dust jacket, large-format calendars, and more.

Haven’t explored this as this service isn’t available in Australia. But the dust jackets are a good idea, and one that other services already offer.

Theme-based home printing: Print high-quality, frame-worthy photos with colored textures, borders and mattes on your home printer.

Sounds like a good idea, and in fact is even better than that description alludes. Not only can you print single photos with fancy frames, but you can choose from various layouts, including for multiple photos on a single page, and with text descriptions if you want. It will probably become quite a popular feature.

Non-advertised new features
And here’s some other cool features I’ve discovered, some I think are more significant than some of those above:

Preview photos before importing
I am delirious with delight over this one! I can’t believe Apple is not promoting this one. This is easily the best new feature of iPhoto. It lets you select all or some photos to import and hide already imported images, although it doesn’t let you delete images or assign keywords before importing. Each import is assigned the Event name you enter for it. Thus if you have several events on your camera, you can import them separately, naming their event as you go.

Camera connection behaviour setting
You can now assign in iPhoto’s preferences, the application to open when you connect a digital camera. Previously you had to go to the obscure Image Capture application. I still think this should be in System Preferences, but having it in iPhoto is most welcome.

Much improved Keywords assignment and management
Another great improvement not heralded by Apple. The Keywords panel has been revamped. As well as improved management and assignment, keywords can now include shortcut keys for common keywords, although this is only accessible while the Keywords panel is open. This panel also has a button to edit keywords.

Flag
You can now flag photos for later editing or use.

Crop tool shows thirds
When using the crop tool, it now displays a grid based on the “rule of thirds” to enable you to better design you crops. (The entry image for this article shows it in use.)

Effects settings indicator
Effects now display whether they are on or off, how many levels of the effect you’ve applied and let you increase or decrease the level of the effect.

Shortcomings
• In the Photos view, showing Events sorts ascending only. Changing sort order only applies within Events. This is annoying as your most recent Events (therefore photos) are way down the bottom when displayed by Event.

• Still no books, calendars or prints Down Under, despite many others providing similar services here.

• Still puts the date bang in the middle of the screen when scrolling, neutering the view. Doesn’t that annoy you too, Steve?

• Can’t group by Events in Albums. This would be infinitely useful. In Albums with your photos lumped all together, you lose the power Events brings.

Events should be a view option in Albums. I could have an Album called Brian in which I place all Events relevant to Brian, such as his birthdays and special events, along with various individual photos of Brian that are subsets of other Events, such as holidays. Now although I can drop an Event into and Album, it doesn’t show in the Album. It would be very useful if those Events of Brian’s could be displayed within the Album.

And this would have been even more useful in Books where you could have easily created a Book with a labeled dividing page for each Event. So for instance, your overseas holiday to Europe, you might have broken each country into its own Event. So if you clicked Autoflow in the book maker, it would automatically insert intro pages for each country. Beautiful! And in iMovie (and other apps using the media browser), instead of scrolling through all the holiday photos in your holiday Album, you’d go straight to the relevant holiday Event. Beautiful! (Now you can display the Events view in the media browser, but it doesn’t show you the name of the Event.)

Unfortunately, for reasons only Apple knows, it chose not to allow you to group Events within Albums.

• You can’t soften photos anymore, as the slider defaults to the left hand position, meaning you can only sharpen them. This may be a bug/flaw, as the yellow help info says “soften or sharpen”.

• The highlights, shadows and noise adjustments also start at the far left, so you can only increase their effect.

• Books still only puts up the yellow exclamation icon when there’s an issue with a photo. It would be nice if clicking on that icon gave a description of the problem and how to fix it.

• Still no support for import from scanners. You still have to scan to a folder and then import that folder. Steve, we all have hundreds and thousands of photos we’d like an easy way to scan directly into iPhoto.

• Export doesn’t work if you’ve had a third party exporter installed, eg a Flickr exporter. To rectify, go to “Get Info” for the iPhoto application, and under plugins, untick any third party photo exporter plugins. Then retry.

• Surprisingly, iPhoto still does not give you access to OS X’s Core Image filters. Besides Photo Booth, does any Apple app? Other in-built editing tools would be useful too, unless of course Apple is developing its own consumer-level image editing application.

• Password protected albums in .Mac Web Gallery cannot be “skimmed” - which does make sense. You can’t password protect your .Mac Web Gallery, so each Album you upload has to have its own password settings. This is reasonable if you want to different access for different groups of people, but an over-riding and thus default setting would also be useful and allow you to have security on your Web Gallery, but still provide skimming of albums.

• iPhoto libraries are now packages. This in itself is not a short coming and should have had one immediate significant advantage, but does not. You should be able to double-click the library to open iPhoto using that library, but that does not work. You still have to hold the Option key when launching iPhoto, or use a iPhoto manager, such as iPhoto Library Manager.

Overall
The conversion of my library of 4,200 images was very quick (less than a minute), painless and error free. It created 240 Events which I’ve slowly been working thru, now having it down to 200. Having upgraded both my libraries, I haven’t encountered any problems with that process or the grouping of photos into Events.

Events has improved my photo management but iPhoto does need to take greater advantage of them.

I imagine there’s still more features I haven’t uncovered yet. Let us know if there’s any you’ve found.

This is a nice upgrade and some of iPhoto’s unheralded features may be the justification some folks need to upgrade.

Next week I’ll be looking at iMovie and iDVD, but in a nutshell, iMovie is sensational, but don’t throw out iMovie 6 just yet. See you next week to find out why.