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iPhoto '08

So last night I decided to sit down and take a slightly longer look at the new iPhoto '08 and see if any changes and features affect my photo workflow. The short answer: not really. Which is a good thing as I'm old enough to be set in my ways. ;-p

The biggest feature that Jobs touted was that now iPhoto will automatically group your photos into "events" (based on date/time I believe). For me, this actually made my workflow one step shorter in some cases. Prior to '08, whenever I downloaded photos from my camera to iPhoto, it would dump everything into one "film roll." Since I normally transfer photos on the same day that they were taken, each of my film rolls pretty much was an event to begin with. On the odd days where I'd have multiple events on my card, it really wasn't a huge deal to split them out into their own film rolls. With '08, film rolls no longer exist. So this new events based organization is basically an evolution of their previous film roll based organization. Which is nice cause that's exactly how I like to organize my photos.

The main reason I've had such trouble transitioning my workflow over to a more professional photo manager like Aperture is because I could never figure out a way to duplicate this film roll/event based organization outside of iPhoto. In Aperture, sure I can create folders for each event and dump the related photos inside, but there was no view where I could view the folders in descending date order. A work-around may have been to add the date to the beginning of the name of the folder but that's just ugly. Plus I use PS3 for all my RAW manipulation and photo editing anyway. Maybe Lightroom can do this type of organization but I haven't had time to check it out yet. Plus, iPhoto does what I want and is simple to use so I haven't really been that motivated to try anything else.

Anyway, back to iPhoto. Besides events, another change that I had to adjust to was assigning keywords to multiple photos. Previous versions had the keywords under the photo information popup but in '08 they've been moved to their own popup. So command-K instead of command-I now. And that's pretty much it as far as my personal workflow is concerned. There's plenty of other functionality available that I don't really use so won't comment about them.

The only other new functionality that I'm currently checking out is the Web Gallery. Basically you can choose a bunch of photos or an event or whatever, click on the Web Gallery button, select a few options and voila! You have a web gallery online. But you need to have a .Mac account for this to work. The interesting part comes with the options that you can choose for it. Stuff like allowing visitors to download the photos, allowing visitors to upload their own photos, and allowing anyone to contribute to the photos by emailing photos to a specific email address.

This last option was what I was most interested in because I had also heard of the "Send to Web Gallery" button on the iPhone that's supposed to exist after you update the phone software to v1.0.1. I must have spent like 45 minutes trying to get the accursed button to show up on my phone to no avail. Sure the email function worked fine if I specifically sent the photo to the given email address but I wanted that damned button!!! ;-p After tinkering around for awhile I just gave up and went to bed.

Interestingly enough, decided to check it again this morning and bam! the button is there. So apparently it takes some time for .Mac and the iPhone to figure out that they can link to each other. So what exactly does the button do? It allows you to choose which web gallery you want to upload the photo to and then creates an email message with the selected photo attached and addressed to the web gallery's email address. So it saves you from having to remember the email addresses of your potentially numerous web galleries. Which I guess is pretty nice if you're big into moblogging. The one I'm playing around with now is here. Figured it'd be a convenient way to throw up photos taken with my iPhone.

So while the '08 version of iPhoto isn't exactly a massive upgrade, it does make my life a teeny bit easier. It also does seem to run a bit faster overall as well.

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on August 15, 2007 10:42 AM.

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