| << Mac OS X serial MIDI support (Griffin) | 2003 > February | Adaptation >> |
Wednesday, 5 February 2003
iPhoto 2.0 and iView MediaPro ::
I tried iPhoto 2.0 and read some reviews that reinforced my impressions of it. O’Reilly’s 12 Hours with iPhoto 2 is a good summary.
Pros: iPhoto 1.x’s cropping and redeye reduction tools work very nicely, and it now has a One Touch Enhance filter that I haven’t tried yet, but the O’Reilly writer thought it was excellent and I’m sure it would benefit my pictures.
Cons: iPhoto still insists on copying your photos into its library. There’s iPhoto Library Manager to tweak its preferences so you can have multiple libraries, but that’s a hack to fix a fundamental design flaw. I want to be able to use the Finder to keep photos organized by date and subject. There are reports of libraries being corrupted when updating from 1.x to 2.0. It doesn’t scale well; what happens when your library gets larger than a CD-ROM? It doesn’t play nice with others; it stores your metadata (captions, which photos belong to which rolls) in a binary format and there’s no way to export them, despite some optimism, last month in Apple Embraces the Open Format Movement. This is the deal-breaker; I have a custom system to generate my online photo albums, with some unique features: create albums within albums, and a pretty nice Javascript slideshow (thanks, Vora).
A comment (dated 2003-02-01 14:10:43) following the O’Reilly article reminded me of iView MediaPro, which I’d downloaded a few months ago but not taken the time to explore fully. They have a liberal free version (45 launches). It seems well-suited for organizing large libraries. It stores metadata in proprietary catalog documents, and has very minimal built-in editing (rotate, manual color correction and cropping, without dimensional constraints like in iPhoto). It has a flexible, template-driven web page generator that still doesn’t suit me, but all of the metadata is exportable as tab-delimited text. It would be relatively trivial to make versions of my custom scripts that work from the metadata. I’ll look at how I might integrate iPhoto into the create-edit-share process (I’m not a major photo tweaker, but who can resist the allure of One Touch Enhance and a good redeye remover?). Any other recommendations?
To those who say Apple is hurting its own developers with the iApps, this is a good example of how a maximally easy-to-use but limited application can introduce users to being digital media producers, not just consumers... and whet their appetites for more powerful commercial tools. I found myself agreeing last month when Dan Gillmor noted, of Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote last month:
The most genuine emotion out of Jobs’ two-hour marathon of product demos was when he implored “You can make this stuff. You can make things that are better than what you get out of Hollywood.”
| << Mac OS X serial MIDI support (Griffin) | 2003 > February | Adaptation >> |