This is just a little stream of consciousness on the fact that I hate iPhoto. This little rant is totally unedited right from my brain and might not make much sense.
I’ve been trying to help my father transfer all of his photos from his old computers (windoz) onto his G5 and I’ve come to the conclusion that iPhoto sucks. It’s especially suckage for people comfortable managing their photos with Window$ XP. In fact iPhoto sucks for anyone with lots of images. It seems anything over like 25 000 images and it becomes useless even on dual 2 G5s.
Windows users are familiar with organizing their photos into folders and when they get into iPhoto they assume its the same way. What they don’t know is that iPhoto creates its own file system based on the EXIF data (date and time the images we’re taken/modified) within the photo and stores photos in its own bizzarre system. So they go about trying to save all their images in folders in the "pictures" folder in OSX and they wonder why they don’t show up in iPhoto. What they don’t understand is that iPhoto is designed to organize your photos for you.
In an effort to simplify the organizing of photos and protect stupid users from themselves apple has created a mess of a folder system for iPhoto. If you take a photo on January 5th 2005 the folder in which iPhoto will store your images is
harddrive/users/username/pictures/iphoto library/2005/01/05/actualpicture
but you aren’t supposed to mess with the photos here. you are supposed to do all your organizing from within iphoto. but people don’t know that coming from the XP "my pictures" folder world.
If you’re used to XP it makes sense to put pictures in the "iphoto library" folder but all it does is screw things up in iPhoto.
Another problem is that once you’ve figured out that iPhoto is supposed to organize your photos for you, you realize that the system that does the organizing is totally flawed. How many people other than us nerds actually read the manual and set the time/date on our digital cameras? The whole iPhoto system is based on this idea that the EXIF data that is created when you take a photo is correct. From my experience hardly anybody sets the date and time correctly on their digital cameras. Even if they do they lose the date and time when the batteries die on their cameras…
I love the idea of ogranizing everything based on this minimal amount of metadata that we create in our imaging process but it just doesn’t work that well in reality. So in a nutshell I think the whole thing is jacked, whether you’re switcher or not.
iPhoto does excel at certain tasks (making books, slick slideshows, browsing lots of thumbnails quickly, its integration with ilife etc) but for me and my 30-40 000 images its a pain in the ass most of the time. Slow, crash prone app, with a weird ass file system that makes it impossible to find stuff.
I’m sitting here waiting for a dual 2.5 ghz G5 to import several thousand photos and its just chugging along at a snails pace. That ain’t right.
I guess my point is that if Steve wants to kick Bill’s ass he’d better fix iPhoto and fast. I’m going to stop telling people to buy macs Steve!
(I heard Scoble talking about how some peeps at microsoft actually subscribe to like pubsub feeds and technorati feeds for "Microsoft Sucks", so I’m hoping somebody at apple does the same)
Comments
38 responses to “iPhoto sucks”
I AGREE ABSOLUTELY!!! First, does he have ilife 05? Its MUCH MUCH better. Second, iphoto still sucks! Ah well…just about everything else about the MAC rules.
JON.
yeah he has ilife 05
it still sucks
they need to change the entire file system…
Also, when you import a whole slew of photos from your digi and use iphoto to delete the ones that you don’t want…they aren’t actually deleted. They just no longer show up. So if you’re trying to save space on your hard-drive, you’re got to go find the pic in that mess of files.
no new posts…u must be havin fun in florida! im jealous! out boatin at all??? im back at work and damn tired! arrrghhhh
This is dumb. You want to organize your files into folders no one is stopping you. Finder will let you do that as well as WindowsXP will. I don’t get your complaint. Now, if you use iPhoto, and you do not have to, yeah, it is going to organize your photos for you. Is there a free alternative that comes with WindowsXP?
Listen, I am not a Mac Apologist. I like my mac, I only have around 5000 pictures, and iPhoto works fine. When I need a picture I don’t care what folder it is in, I just open iPhoto and drag it into Photoshop. Once again, that is because I enjoy the way iPhoto tags and imports. If I didn’t, I would just organize my files manually…just like you apparently prefer in Windows.
It is the things people don’t understand about iTunes and iPhoto. These are just viewing programs. They are file management programs designed to separate the user from the filesystem. I am pretty techno-saavy, but, to be honest, I am sick of having to know where my files are on the computer. Maybe you’d be happier if you had to flick the little magnetic switches on the hard drive to create and organize your files. Me, i am happy to have my computer do what it was designed to do.
I never said I wanted to organize my photos in folders. What I said is that Windows users are familiar with organizing their photos into folders and that it’s never made apparent that iphoto will sort and store their photos based on the EXIF data in the digital images. As a result they get all messed up when they try to do things with their images in the iphoto file system. Also if and when the date is set incorrecly on their digital camera they will have pictures that are all out of order in iphoto
…
I HATE iPHOTO too. my pics are 6MP, takes forever to load or change them. Do you know any other program? in my PC days I used picasa, which is absolutly the best thing ever.
I don’t know of any other good apps on the mac.
Iview Media Pro is supposed to be ok…
I just want iphoto to get better…
I have a cluster muck of pictures imorprted with new iphoto when I upgraded to 10.3. …..oh wow what a mess of duplicates of pics and files and thumbnails ……shees.
It will take me a weekend to harvest all the originals and start over with one big import….therefore losing all the dates and modifications.
Iphoto is crap
I have thousands of duplicates as well.
So annoying…
OK OK…IPhoto does indeed suck…but instead of just ranting…can someone figure out what to actually use instead? I thought about trying Picture Arena…but I don’t have time to experiment with stuff…that’s why I switched to Mac in the first place!! So…someone do the legwork for me, damnit.
Kodak EasyShare + Gimp 2.0 , which also sucks, but not as much as iPhoto, and at least it’s free.
To all you who hate this little piece of crap but feel hostage of this program just because your iphoto.db library has gotten to big there might be a solution, only tested on my pc, but extracts each iphoto roll to a single xml file whith the names and paths for easy retrieval.
I am migrating this to easyshare right now and kicking away iPhoto.
I would gladly share with anyone interesed the source code, which are 3 C simple programs.
An example
strip an iphoto.db to multiple files like this one
“roll####.xml”
Roll tille
518
image path
…path../Thumbs/518.jpg
etc. for each picture
At first, I agreed with your comments…being that I’m bringing all my media from my Windows XP PC over to my Mac, I was used to the idea of organizing by folders. Funny thing was that I was already organizing them by date anyway. The more I started to play with iPhoto, the more I liked it. I got used to the organization and the different ways you can play with metadata and truly found power in its ability to organize photos. Adding comments, correcting date/time info, batch conversions, web gallery export…all the features I needed in a program.
But dealing with 30,000 some photos is a great deal (compared to my measly 4000), so I guess it works better for those of us who don’t need to manage as many photos as you do.
i agree with the last guy, im a photographer with over 50k images. iphoto is the best! no problems with speed or anything. i think you all need to read the manual and learn how to use the application properly!
I think you so called “photograher” need to read what I said. I said iphoto sucks for people who are coming over from Windows.
The application is fine if its the only thing you know how to use.
iPhoto sucks when you have more than 2500 images to organize. Instead of storing all thumpnails into one file Apple believes it´s more clever to store each thump seperate.
Anyway, the average Macuser is used to wait for his Mac, so this only borthers people that are used to PC speed.
I agree iphoto sucks so much, and I am so upset.
And Applecare had no help for my situation.
iphoto 05 has DELETED ALL 3000 of my photos from the last year, rendering them into empty files. I bought iLife so that I could organize my photos better; at least before I could veiw them one at a time, but since I had moved the library folder, which I now know is forbidden, to an external drive, all of the pictures became invisible in iPhoto. I had no reason to suspect that IPhoto would manage (mangle!) data in a way different from all other Apple applications. So when I installed the new version, all the old phots went form being unviewable in iphoto but veiwable in other application, to being rendered into empty files.
I am so sad, I don’t know how I’m going to break it to my wife, who took nearly all the pictures from our travels. :(
I have to agree iPhoto sucks. Its slow, it takes a lot of time with a lame “loading photo” text in fast pbooks. And what pisses me off, is that you cant view a photo in full screen without slideshows. Cmon, apple can do better than that. I wish we had a version of Picasa for macos. Lets hope someone ports an opensource version of a decent image viewer. Most mac users are fanatic and kinda blind, I see people saying “Picasa sucks, iPhoto have three times more features”, what features? it can download image from the camera, organize them in lame EXIF folders and show them slowly? I bet my MSX can do that.
Picasa certainly puts iphoto to shame
Yes, iPhoto does suck. The only feature that I enjoy about iPhoto is the speed of organizing pictures, when your library is in the size of < 1000 photos. I've been using the slideshow feature inside Tiger. It's the menu inside the rotary gear dropdown in a finder window. It works well and has a thumbnails feature too. The bad part is that the slideshow doesn't perform any filename sort on the pictures, so everything goes out of order. I only advise using the Finder slideshow for fast viewing. It's a free alternative to launching slow ass iPhoto for viewing freshly downloaded camera pics.
IPhoto is so bad it’s unbelievable. We’re up to version 5 and it gets worse. I’ve given up on it. It’s amazing that Apple could produce OS X – a fantastic system with fanatstic apps and put out a turkey like iPhoto. I got used to the file system (I’m also ex-Windows) and can work with it but the SPEED!!! Ugh! Sloooooow. I’d start it up and go have a coffee while it loaded. Even quitting took forever. Well, for a while I’d been thinking maybe my computer was at fault. A 667Mhz G4 powerbook with 512Mb RAM. But yesterday i got a new Mini – double the speed and same RAM. iPhoto took forever to start up EMPTY. I trashed it. I use iView Media. Even Graphic Converter is a very good alternative.
What’s your problem Apple? FIX IPHOTO!!!
I hate iPhoto too.
Things that suck:
1. all files imported lose their names. imagine if iTunes did this. I want to email an mp3 to my friend, and the filename is: 235.mp3? What the $F@$%?
2. import feature will happily grab 6 gigs of photos, churn away for five days, and create something called “last roll” containing 6,332,308 photos for you to sort by hand. No keywords, no filenames, no metadata, just raw thumbnails to sort like one giant sock-drawer-of-photos-from-hell.
3. There are no useful automator actions that would cure problem #2. I would at least like automator or applescript solutions for importing image libraries. I’ve been a windows user, doing digital photography for some time. This frigging piece of iphoto junk is worse than useless for anyone with a 5 or 10 year history of digital photos. And I’m just a home user, not a professional photographer.
What would I like? If apple is listening?
1. Let me have my own filenames and folder structure. Preserve those filenames and leave the files in my Pictures folder where they belong, an album import should create additional metadata without disturbing my existing organization. For that matter, let me keep my files outside the ugly iphoto library folders completely, and make albums that correspond 1:1 to my existing folder structure. Let me move organically to whatever toys you give me, without having to start over like its my first day, my first digital photo. iphoto sucks for anyone with >1 folders of existing images, and >100 images to get sorted before you start.
2. Speed up the frigging import feature, willya? Couldn’t you do some cursory import without generating thumbnails, and then when I click on a folder that has no thumbnails, generate the thumbnails or whatever it is you do while you’re thinking so long, manage that better so it doesn’t get in my way.
3. Create a decent library of automator actions that will import a large collection of folders automatically add keywords based on filename and folder structure, etc. In short, go find 1000 users with large libraries of files, find out how they organize it, and automate the import for them.
Until at least those two things are fixed, I will continue to hate iPhoto.
Warren
Try storing your 20k+ photos on a network drive.. I found that to be the only working solution to share photos among different users and computers. However, it turned the super-slow iPhoto into mega-ultra-slow-crash-prone one. (Although I did love the program when I only had a few thousand pics in it.)
So, now I’ve got my photos stored on a good old Windows-style directory structure (/yyyy/yyyy_mm_dd-event_name/). I still use iPhoto, but just to store the best shots that can be displayed through Front Row
did a search for “iPhoto sucks”, here we are…
for the average consumer (me) the most common thing i need to do with a photo is fix the red eye. iPhoto does a total hack job on this. puts a blue ring around a very dark black center, looks pretty bad.
hp’s photo app. does a much better job with red eye (adjustable size area of correction, adjustable color level)
I wholeheartedly agree. I was really excited about iLife- it was one of the reasons I decided to buy a MacBook instead of a Sony. I never even BEGAN to consider that, by using this photo browsing program, you COULDN’T organize your photos the way you want to.
I want a good folder structure for my photos. That way I’ll be able to find them in 30 years. If you think we’ll still be using iPhoto in 2037, you’re dreaming. Good luck finding your photos.
The thing is, LOTS of things on Mac work like this. I’ve gone to the genius bar with many questions many times. The answer, every time, is “you can’t do that”. WTF!?
i found this site after trying to unravel the iphoto filing system that i inadvertently messed by, yes, trying to organize and rename within the filing system. how was i supposed to know that you can’t or you’ll screw things up royally. so in frustration i googled “iphoto sucks” and this site came up. thanks for understanding!
Since this seem to be a common Pit of iPhoto Despair, I’ll drop here my 2c.
–Isn’t it a bit too bold (or insane) going into a folder used by an organizing app and start changing data? I also tried that, mind you, but as soon as I saw that it was more than just my images, I simply left it alone – and GTFO and started using something else, as I preferred to be in control. Interestingly, iPhoto 7 (iLife’08) converts the iPhoto Library into a package, so users will perhaps think at least twice before touching. (Though they should have made it a package before, I think).
–Adam made a good point about not using iPhoto in 2037. But iPhoto (6 at least) does offer using your photos without importing them into the library, and that’s what I am now investigating: so I can use my external disk in OS X and Windows, with whatever software and filesystem organization, but with the iPhoto library ready if needed. (the problem will then be syncing the iPhoto library to the actual state of the photos… but a bit of discipline, care and “iPhotoDiet” (freeware) should do the trick, although I’m hoping that iPhoto will be careful itself)
my biggest problems with iPhoto 08 are that when I uploaded all of my old photos, iPhoto made duplicates of all of my images and made half of those onto horrible quality… When I tried sending in a couple photos t costco to print, I didn’t realize that one of them was crap quality, and when my picture came back in an 8 by 10″ size, it looked pixelated and almost unrecognizable… Does anybody know where I ca find the good old iPhoto?!
Hi Scott,
I just did a quick search and found this:
http://www.oldapps.com/iPhoto.php
I (platonically) love you Duncan. If I didn’t find the old iPhoto, I would have had to wait until the school year started to get the good old iPhoto back. Thanks a billion (photos)
I am also new to MAC from WINDOWS, and had watched the videos for iPhoto, and thought it looked great.
Now I have discovered that I cannot use my native filing system.
At least WINDOWS Live Photo gives you the choice.
FINDER is great, especially with coverflow. I like the way of viewing events in iPhoto, and being able to browse by moving the mouse of the event thumb, and being able to change thumbnails, and hide less desirable pics. But I would love to be able to open an ‘event’ and have sub-events inside.
An example may help: We have been renovating our house, and have photos in a main folder called Rennovation, and sub-folders for each room, Bedroom1 Bedroom2, Lounge, Kitchen, Bathroom etc. Inside each sub-folder are folders for each stage of the works on that room. I can enter the Bathroom folder, and then open the various folders documenting the various stages of renovation over several months. As the kitchen project was running at the same time, I can enter the kitchen folder to look at the various stages of that part of the project. In WINDOWS Live Photo I can select ‘Bathroom’-Phase 7 and can see a slide show of that phase, or can select ‘Bathroom’ and run a slide show for all the Bathroom phases, one after the next. In iPhoto, ‘Events’, Phase 7 and 8 of the bathroom, has phase 4 of the kitchen between them, because of the date stamping. But all continuity is lost because I have Phase 1 of Bedroom1, and Phase 2 of the Lounge in between also; along with my photos of a trip to London, one to Dublin, and those of a friends Wedding, my dad’s birthday, and a trip to a cricket match. What a mess!
Ok, so it looked like I’m going to be using Finder for now. But when I installed VISTA Ultimate in Bootcamp, and tried WINDOWS LIVE PHOTO for the first time, it did what I wanted.
I switched to MAC because I was sick of Gates and Co. forcing me to do it their way, and because everyone said how much more productive I could be with a MAC.
If APPLE are listening, please give us the chance to choose how we want to organise our photos in iPhoto. At the moment I am using WINDOWS LIVE PHOTO for slideshows.
Disappointed after spending over £2000 on a MAC, to find that I either have to go back to WINDOWS or install another application on MAC.
I’m an interface designer who works primarily on Windows GUIs during the day and Mac GUIs in my spare time because I just like them better. I think Safari and much of the iWork suite is some of the best software I’ve ever seen. I’m saying this so you don’t think I’m a rabid mac-hater.
iTunes is subtly inconsistent, but when properly configured it’s a fine program. It stores most of the useful information on the files themselves.
I’m going to ignore the (substantial) performance issues because people have already touched upon them. But the iPhoto interface team must have been composed of the dregs of Apple’s designers, because the application’s workflow is so brittle that if a single one of their (mostly unreasonable) assumptions about how you work is wrong the whole mess becomes useless. They assume all of your photos have correct EXIF data or else everything is out of order and must be fixed by hand. If you have thousands of old scanned photos… well it sucks to be you. They assume you always want photos in chronological order. They assume They assume you do not want to share individual photos along with metadata with other people (e.g. sending photos to your family) because modifications like your carefully modified dates are stored in the iPhoto database, not on the image file itself. (Why anyone would voluntarily allow their data to be held hostage in a buggy database like iPhoto’s is beyond me.)
I might even be able to use iPhoto without dying a little inside if I had never used superior photo management utilities like Google’s Picasa, Coverflow in the Finder, or Windows Explorer. As a Mac lover, it saddens me to say this, but if you have ever used a photo management utility, you have probably used a better photo management utility than iPhoto.
So, my recommendation for photo management? Fusion and Picasa for $80. If you have a lot of photos and need the performance, Bootcamp and Picasa for free. I feel terrible for people falsely lured to the Mac platform with false promises of easily managing all your photos, and hope that they don’t see that as a reflection on the Mac experience as a whole. Most of the programs out there for the Mac platform are as pretty as iPhoto but actually work intuitively too! Please don’t leave!
ohh ..i don’t know where to start .. My macbook 2.2 3G memory is a DOG when anything natural is done to a raw imported image into Aperture .. Not much mpressed with intuitivity of iphoto as people suggested above .. Just downloaded Picasa 3, hoping and praying, because i just smoked any type of fine tuned Aperture processing of camera B&W photos using a trial of a Russian magical tool, which lives sharpening of Aperture in the dust. Where was i .. Oh yeah im about to sell the mac and go back to Hell – Window$ and all, please help me God
I just wanted to add that now that I have downloaded the beta version of picasa, I have tried to use both iphoto and picasa together, as it tells you they have been designed to work in synch with one another, but it’s quite the lie. Try importing your iphoto library to picasa and you get a bunch of the same folders with only 1/2 to 2/3 of the total photo in each, with the others just not showing up for some unknown reason. And if you try moving the rest manually, you get all the other duplicate files alongside them placed in an entirely new folder within picasa. Basically, there’s no point in using iphoto anymore now that picasa is available for mac. Not that there was any point prior. Iphoto is by far the worst photo organizer I’ve come across, with itunes being a second rate music player/organizer. Other than that, the mac still reigns.
Hey suckers,
I used to organise all my files in Windows files system for about 20 years, too, and I don’t know how much time of my life was wasted in trying to become a nerd.
To all Windows-fetishists, just get the f@#$ back to were you come from and stop nagging about something which seems to be too simple and user-friendly for ya. Especially the new apple product range is designed to give everyone the opportunity to use a computer easily, even my 70 year old parents or the 20 year old un-nerd who uses a computer casually and doesn’t want to get a degree in rocket science.
It took me a couple of hours to figure out how easy apple-software (especially iTunes & iPhoto) is and of course I was confused and uncomfortable to begin with but realised that you must take of your Windows blinker and start thinking simple. NO worries, I just imported about 40.000 pictures and organising pictures has never been so easy. Well done Apple and their smart developers.
The good thing is that everyone has a choice so if you don’t love it just leave it. It’s as simple as set. If you don’t like a Merc stop complaining about driving one but buy a Hyundai and leave the Merc-drivers alone.
No hard feelings, Cheers!
Relax Mick it’s just software.
I decided to type "iPhoto sucks" in Bing and I came across your blog! I am SO glad I'm not the only one who feels like this!!!! I'm sorry for Apple, but so many of their default programs suck and iPhoto is no exception. And if you're thinking I'm a PC enthusiast, get a load of this: I used Macs since Mac Plus, ALL my personal computers have been Macs. I have to admit, Apple has begun to complicate people's lives starting with their introduction of OSX. Whatever happened to simplicity in the Mac? Whatever happened to "don't trust a computer you can not lift"? Well to be more specific, how the hell am I supposed to find my pictures in the Finder? I went through a MILLION folders and I can't find the ones I just took! Forget about using a replacement program, I tried doing that years ago with my G3 333, but Apple makes it PAINFUL for you to use your own program. Now how the heck do I take ALL my pictures and drop them into a data disk? I see options to make picture discs, I don't want that, nor need it, I want a plain old disc with jpg pictures I can open in ANY platform regardless of what OS or program it runs. I went to the Finder opened the folder in which I thought the pictures were in AND the folder is EMPTY. I formatted my camera's memory. Now I open iPhoto and see the pictures but what the heck do I do with them!? The program absolutely sucks and it's not like I haven't given it a chance, I tried using it since the introduction of OSX I could never figure it out. And I consider myself an intermediate to experienced user, imagine how many inexperienced users are pulling their hairs trying to figure this stupid program out? I feel bad for anyone who has to use iPhoto!!!
Lil
I decided to type "iPhoto sucks" in Bing and I came across your blog! I am SO glad I'm not the only one who feels like this!!!! I'm sorry for Apple, but so many of their default programs suck and iPhoto is no exception. And if you're thinking I'm a PC enthusiast, get a load of this: I used Macs since Mac Plus, ALL my personal computers have been Macs. I have to admit, Apple has begun to complicate people's lives starting with their introduction of OSX. Whatever happened to simplicity in the Mac? Whatever happened to "don't trust a computer you can not lift"? Well to be more specific, how the hell am I supposed to find my pictures in the Finder? I went through a MILLION folders and I can't find the ones I just took! Forget about using a replacement program, I tried doing that years ago with my G3 333, but Apple makes it PAINFUL for you to use your own program. Now how the heck do I take ALL my pictures and drop them into a data disk? I see options to make picture discs, I don't want that, nor need it, I want a plain old disc with jpg pictures I can open in ANY platform regardless of what OS or program it runs. I went to the Finder opened the folder in which I thought the pictures were in AND the folder is EMPTY. I formatted my camera's memory. Now I open iPhoto and see the pictures but what the heck do I do with them!? The program absolutely sucks and it's not like I haven't given it a chance, I tried using it since the introduction of OSX I could never figure it out. And I consider myself an intermediate to experienced user, imagine how many inexperienced users are pulling their hairs trying to figure this stupid program out? I feel bad for anyone who has to use iPhoto!!!