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)
