“The extraordinary growth of digital cameras in the mass market has left millions of consumers with billions of snapshots loitering inside their cameras’ memories. Lots of those people are wondering: Now what do I do? It’s a valid question… Photo-management software hasn’t proliferated with quite the same frenzy as the cameras,” Stephen Williams writes for New York Newsday.
Williams then looks at a bunch of programs that aren’t designed to serve the same functions: Adobe Photoshop CS, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Roxio Photosuite 7, and Apple’s iPhoto.
“Apple’s iPhoto. A basic program, now part of Apple’s iLife suite designed to further Steve Jobs’ philosophy of the Mac as ‘digital hub.’ iPhoto is fast at importing data, fun to play with, especially for those who want to ready pictures to share on the Web, but it’s too basic even for intermediate users who want to experiment with manipulation,” Williams writes. “There is a new update available online, version 4.0.1, that Apple says includes many organizational and stability enhancements plus improved thumbnail images in the photo library. The suite costs $49.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Williams seems to have lost his train of thought here. He set out to take a look at “photo-management” software and took a big detour into image manipulation. The problem is that Williams critiques Apple’s iPhoto for its lack of manipulation features, but he should be reviewing it based upon what iPhoto is supposed to do, namely, act as a digital shoebox for your digital images. If Williams hadn’t gotten confused, he’d do his readers a better service and point out that iPhoto does a great job at what it is designed to do – organize and share your photos and provide the basic necessities at image enhancement. Williams also should have mentioned that the $49 price he menitons for iPhoto is really for the entire iLife suite of software which also contains iMovie, iTunes, iDVD, and GarageBand. Or, the put it plainly, the best $49 you’ve ever spent on software.
As Apple themselves say on their website, “iPhoto puts you in charge of your photographs