“Two of the best photo organizers have just been updated, and I have been testing them on my collection of more than 10,000 digital photos. One is Picasa 2, which runs only on Windows and is now a free offering from Google, which purchased Picasa last year. The other is Apple Computer’s iPhoto 5
, which runs only on the Macintosh. It comes free on every new Mac. Existing Mac owners can buy it as part of the excellent $79 iLife suite, which also includes programs for organizing and editing music and videos, and for authoring DVDs,” Walter S. Mossberg and Katherine Boehret report for The Wall Street Journal.
“Both programs are packed with good features and have been significantly upgraded in their new versions. But iPhoto is the better of the two — mainly because, unlike Picasa and most other competitors, it totally frees users from understanding the computer’s file-and-folder system. With iPhoto you can organize your photos in any way you choose, regardless of where the underlying picture files are stored on the computer. This makes iPhoto much easier to use than Picasa, or any other photo organizing program I have tested,” Mossberg and Katherine Boehret report. “If you have a Windows PC, Picasa is a decent choice, as long as you understand and maintain a good system of folders on the hard disk. But Mac owners have a better overall photo organizer in iPhoto.”
Full article here.
You can organize your photos in iPhoto chronologically too. In fact, there is a calendar button that you can hit and it allows you to filter the viewed photos down by the dates/months you select. Dead simple. No need for a tray, or a useless collage button, or 2 burn CD buttons with little difference to each. All the buttons require you set up accounts with several other services, whereas iPhoto uses the .mac account for everything. Its not even easy to edit the info associated with each picture, like name and comments. A menu command or contextual menu is needed for that. You can star pictures, but not give them an actual rating. Crashes often(or that might just be my copy of windows). You have to apply each edit before adjusting the next one, which really is a pain.
That said, its good for a windows program, with smooth transitions between different UIs and a decent look. But seriously, enough with the wizards. I hate having to read instructions for everything, including what should be the most simple of tasks.
iphoto kind of blows,
Agreed. I never use iPhoto for the simple reason that it needs to maintain its own little library of my pictures. So I either have each picture taking up twice as much space as it needs to or I get rid of my HD accessible copy and have to rely on iPhoto each time I want to do anything at all with a picture. For that reason, I’ve taken to using GraphicConverter’s file browser to sift through photos. I also like the fact that GC shows thumbnails of the folder along with a blowup of the selected file. With iPhoto, you get one or the other, but you can’t have both. If Apple would address those two issues, both of which could be handled by adding a preference for doing things one way or the other so people who like the current system wouldn’t find it suddenly changed, I would switch to iPhoto in a heartbeat. Until then, I just find it too bothersome.
iphoto kind of blows, Shempzilla and others,
If you want to edit a photo in Photoshop, you can set the iPhoto prefs to automatically open the photo in the editor of your choice when you double-click. If you want to get a copy of the photo to put somewhere else, just drag it from the iPhoto window to anywhere else (another app, the finder, etc.). If you want to get direct access to all your photos all at once, just go into your iPhoto Library folder, type command+F and search for files with kind “Image” and whatever other criteria you want. Then copy from the results window. Of course, this exercise seems silly when you can just open iPhoto and drag the pics you want from there.
The number one reason to use iPhoto: Non-destructive editing. Correct colour temperature, exposure, red-eye, crop, etc. to your hearts content and you never have to worry about regretting it because you can always go back and revert to the original photo.
Feature request for iPhoto 6: Allow me to undo any changes in any order. It would be nice to un-crop the image down the road without having to redo colour correction, red eye, etc. Oh yeah, and it would be nice to be able to play movies in iPhoto slideshows and within iPhoto without having to open it in QuickTime Player.
If iPhoto is too slow, and you use it a lot, then it might be time to buy a new Mac.
Now that iPhoto and iTunes manages my media files for me, I have so much more time to enjoy the media and not worry about keeping it organized/finding it.
Andy C,
Thanks for the tips, but unfortunately they don’t really address either of my big concerns with iPhoto. If/when Apple takes those things into consideration, I’d happily switch, because there are some other great features to iPhoto, and of course it’s the only one of its kind featuring Apple’s style. Which unfortunately in this case includes more brushed metal, but I could live with that. Though I do wish they’d just give us a choice to get rid of it…
As discussed in the article, the beauty of iPhoto is that you don’t need to access the file structure.
Don’t say iPhoto blows because you can’t access the file structure. That’s why iPhoto is good.
With iPhoto, you never need to access the file structure. Want a photo? Drag it where you want it. iPhoto takes care of it. Want to edit it in PS? ctrl click it, choose edit in external program.
Use iPhoto before you say it blows.
I have been using Iphoto since the first version came out.
It has always bothered me that the software decides for me.
It took me until I found Picasa to finally be happy with organising
photo’s.
Last year I lost my photo’s due to a faulty HD, luckely I
had backups on CD and DVD and some I could recover from the faulty HD. You have no idea what a pain it is to get the Iphoto library back into Iphoto, specially with all these folders and sub, sub folders.
Since then I switched to picasa on my PC and ever since I never ever
touch Iphoto anymore, picasa is faster, has more possibilities and works in almost all points better then Iphoto.
But if Iphoto works for you and you don’t mind the slower response and you like the way things are organised, then there is no problem.
But it is strange which tricks and manouvres some people do to convince themselves how much they like Iphoto. I see the same with people who are so used to OSX that they are blind for the good parts of other OS’es, the same with people who are totally crazy about XP.
I have both a Mac and a PC and I use them both for what they are best suited for, people who used XP by means of virtual PC, well they didn’t use XP you can not compare a virtual PC to a real PC.
Picasa is absolutely free and good and it would be good if they would port it to OSX that people who use a mac would have a choice and learn to appreciate the good things from picasa.
I’m using photogrid on my powerbook (1.67ghz G4 w/ 1gig ram) until Google makes a mac version of Picasa. The only thing I use iPhoto for is a library of my artwork. I got iPhoto 5.0 with my mac free. I guess that is a good thing since I wouldn’t pay more than 20 bucks for it.
You don’t get very many features with photogrid, but it is a heck of a lot faster than iPhoto and is great if you have a collection of 5,000 or more images.
iView Media Pro is nice but I don’t like how it creates library files and it sucks having to “import”. I would much rather “browse” a directory structure. It has great IPTC support, though. It is definitely not worth $200.
Another good OSX program for features and price $30 is Graphic Converter by Lemkesoft. It is almost like a combination of Photoshop and Picasa without the bells and whistles. It also has IPTC support for people who like to embed metadata (like captions/keywords etc.) into their actual images. This program is no doubt worth the $30 price tag.
Of course you could go get a Mac version of GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) and use a freeware browser with it but I don’t like how they ported GIMP to the mac. It requires x11 to run.
Adobe Bridge makes iPhoto look fast in terms of load time. iPhoto starts fairly quickly but chokes if you overload it with files. The directory structure that it uses is geared towards digital photographers (mostly hobbyists) who like to organize by date. I hate that it won’t let you organize your own photos. Sure, it uses keywords but that is a very proprietary method of organizing.
I’ve tested well over twenty leading macOSX image browsers/organizers/editors ($30-$200 apps, shareware, freeware, etc.) and the fastest one I’ve seen is Photogrid. The best feature is that you can choose to “go deep” and view the images in the subfolders.
I suppose I’m going to continue to use a combination of Graphic Converter, Photogrid, iPhoto and Preview until Google wakes up and starts giving Mac users a little more support. I will always use Photoshop regardless. It is a completely different animal than Picasa.
iPhoto is for RETARDS, exactly as the article says above:
“But iPhoto is the better of the two — mainly because, unlike Picasa and most other competitors, it totally frees users from understanding the computer’s file-and-folder system”
the application’s proprietary image-files folder management system is totally retarded, i’m a both platform user and i know what i say. If you ever decide to move your whole ‘iPhoto’ album images files manually, i wish you good luck at it! How can you pretend it is the better of the two! the shit has not even easy to use functions such as an ability to print a grid like / contact sheet page out of a selected set of pictures ! I have tried many times to get used to it as hard as i could, unfortunately i gave up. The whole mac/os X platform is great, the only what it is missing is a decent image browser, i WISH google will do the step and make Picasa2 available for OS X !!! PLEASE