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

by Chris Howard Aug 15, 2007

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.

Comments

  • Under Shortcomings it says: “showing Events sorts ascending only”

    Works for me…

    Choose View menu: Sort Events
    Choices are :
      By Date
      By Keyword
      By Title
      By Rating
      Manually
    ———————
      Ascending
      Descending

    moldyapples had this to say on Aug 15, 2007 Posts: 8
  • Photos view, Moldy.

    The selected sort applies within each Event. The order of Events remains as Date, Ascending.

    Chris Howard had this to say on Aug 15, 2007 Posts: 1209
  • >Still puts the date bang in the middle of the screen when scrolling, neutering the view. Doesn’t that annoy you too, Steve?

    If it’s the position that bugs you, n/m, BUT: there are two preferences (Appearance and Events) that allow you to not “Show scrolling information” at all.

    n[ate]vw had this to say on Aug 15, 2007 Posts: 1
  • All in all, I agree that it is a good solid improvement over the previous version.

    “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.”

    Ah, I was looking for that, thanks.  I have several copies of previous photos that are dated by their creation date, which makes the “event” feature useless unless you can change the meta data of the photo.

    “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.”

    Agreed.  Events is a nice first step, but limited for now.  Still, a nice first step.

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

    Also, in the previous version of iPhoto, you could apply a filter multiple times.  In the new one, you can only apply “sharper” once.  Or at least, I haven’t been able to figure out otherwise.  I’ve resulted to editing in Photoshop several times already for something as simple as sharpening.

    Beeblebrox had this to say on Aug 15, 2007 Posts: 2220
  • Thanks for the tip, n[ate]vw. Turning them off is an improvement. Would be nicest though if they were displayed somewhere off the photos window, such as over the toolbar.

    Chris Howard had this to say on Aug 15, 2007 Posts: 1209
  • There is a huge new problem with the iPhoto library being a package instead of a folder. This involves the editing of photos previously imported into iPhoto 06 and previously edited in another application.

    If I want to edit them in another application again (photoshop) these photos cannot (at least for me) be saved back into the iPhoto library. The help data says I can do this if I do a Revert to Original first, but it’s definitely not working that way on my machine.

    To reedit these images, I have to open them in Photoshop, save outside the iPhoto library, reimport to the iPhoto library as a new event, merge events, and then hide the original photo in iPhoto. In 06, all I had to do was save.

    This does not appear to be a problem with images newly imported in 08, but my primary 06 library contains 21,228 images from my iPhoto 06 library. That’s pretty ugly for something that is called an upgrade.

    Other than this and the fact that 08 is dog slow compared to 06, the new features are really quite nice.

    Bill Fuller had this to say on Aug 16, 2007 Posts: 1
  • “Photos view, Moldy.”

    D’oh! You are correct,  I guess my brain is kinda moldy these days!

    moldyapples had this to say on Aug 16, 2007 Posts: 8
  • Note that if you use the “Adjust Date and Time” feature to change the date of an event, what you’re actually doing is changing the date of all the photos in the event.  Events no longer have an explicit date that can be set independently from their photos’ dates.  iPhoto ‘08 appears to use the date of the first photo in the event when it comes to sorting and such, and the info pane for an event only shows the date range of the contained photos, with no separate date for the event itself.  This pretty much makes sense for the most part, but it is slightly less flexible than what you could do with rolls in previous versions.

    Brian Webster had this to say on Aug 16, 2007 Posts: 2
  • Thanks, Bill.

    Brian, was the “Adjust Date and Time” available for Rolls? I never had figured out how to change Roll dates. I’m not sure I if I even worked out how to rename them.

    Chris Howard had this to say on Aug 16, 2007 Posts: 1209
  • Looking forward to iPhoto’s increased editing abilities.

    Neil Anderson had this to say on Aug 16, 2007 Posts: 23
  • Chris: In iPhoto 6 and earlier, you could select a roll and edit its date and time down in the info pane in the lower left corner of the window.  You could also edit their name/comment down there as well.

    Brian Webster had this to say on Aug 17, 2007 Posts: 2
  • iPhoto is the big incentive for me. Anyone have any experience with its performance on G4 hadware?

    Benji had this to say on Sep 27, 2007 Posts: 927
  • Page 1 of 1 pages
You need log in, or register, in order to comment