iPhoto ‘06

Jan 24

iPhoto ‘06

371 views.Photography, technology Add comments

Forget about Aperture’s ‘beta release’ - it’s all about iLife ‘06! I installed the yearly update late last week, and good lord does it rock. The improvements to iPhoto alone are worth the price of admission.

My iPhoto’05 library was over 28k images. So I was surprised to hear various reports that the ‘06 installment increased capacity from 25k to 250k. Hmmm - perhaps that’s why my old install was so sluggish - but never any errors or warnings about the size of ye olde library. Anyway, the new version is blazingly fast - like WOW!

It also upgrades handling of RAW images. In iPhoto5, your edits to RAW images were to a JPEG version. You could also edit in an external editor, but you were still working with the JPEG version. 2006’s version enhances this by letting you open the actual RAW file in the external editor. It doesn’t automagically import the RAW edits back to iPhoto (though I wish it would), but you can fairly easily re-import the edited RAW version.

technorati tags: ilife, iphoto, photography, mac, apple

Full screen editing has also made the leap from Aperture to the consumer photo app. You can select multiple images, hit the ‘full-screen’ icon, and voila! A very nice full-screen view of your images. You can also mouse among these to lock your selection, then thumb through other images in that ’slot’ with your arrow keys. And it’s about 5x faster than freaking Aperture is on my dual 2.5G5. The full screen mode includes an ability to rate images, zoom in, fit to screen etc. Looks sweeeeet on the old 24″ monitor ;-).

I’m also digging the integration with iWeb and the Photocasts. If I want a slightly prettier presentation of images I want to post I might use the iWeb feature; and Photocasts will be a nice way to make sure friends and family get the latests photos of Sam.
There are some comments about how Photocasting breaks some RSS standards - but if you dig deep, there are not so many standards around photo syndication, so Apple had to break some new ground here. Whatever - it just ‘works’ to a large degree.

I’ll also let folks discuss how some of these features - Photocasts, iWeb to some degree, etc. require a dotMac subscription - that does suck. But it’s probably worth spending the cash to enable all that integration. Maybe .Mac will again be free one day soon….

technorati tags: ilife, iphoto, photography, mac, apple

Tags: Mac, macintosh, Photography