Comments on: iPhoto 4.0 gripes

By: Chunky Monkey

Chunky Monkey — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 00:34:24 +0000

Well of course iPhoto 3 is running slowly for you–it doesn’t exist! Apple’s iPhoto naming scheme
jumped from version 2 to version 4 with no version 3. Hard to use software that has never been.

By: Rachel

Rachel — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 23:02:23 +0000

Ugh, isn’t that the truth? When I was shooting jpgs primarily, I used iPhoto pretty exclusively. I like being able to look back through my photos and visually find stuff I shot, but it got so slow once I had 500 or 1000 photos imported, and I’ve got tens of thousands of photos now. I shoot in RAW format primarily these days, which iPhoto only marginally supports, and I use Photoshop to edit them now (definitely not the cheapest option, but the best I’ve found), but whenever I plug in my memory card, iPhoto still opens and slows everything down in the meantime. I can’t figure out how to turn that off anymore. Incidentally, for what it’s worth, the old Linux standby, GIMP, has a Mac OS X photo editor. From the small amount of research I’ve done, it’s a pain to install, but it’s pretty versatile once it’s up and running.

By: Gabriel Suerte

Gabriel Suerte — Sat, 22 Jan 2005 03:38:50 +0000

Right you are, old bean — glad somebody’s paying attention! iPhoto 5 needs to offer the user a way to adjust the JPEG compression ratio for all its Export operations; iPhoto 4’s seems to be cranked to 11…

By: Prentiss Riddle

Prentiss Riddle — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 19:23:15 +0000

Yeah, I’m not talking about the size of the images as stored in iPhoto’s library, I wouldn’t expect them to be optimized for size. I’m referring to the images produced by the File > Export > Web Page process, where it’s explicit that the images are intended for an environment in which size is important.

(While I’m at it I could also complain that iPhoto’s web pages have never heard of style.)

Thanks for the tip about Graphic Converter. I’ve heard other recommendations as well and thought it might be a replacement for Photoshop in the post-iPhoto optimization step, especially since I gather it can do bulk operations. From your description it sounds like it can do much more than that. I need to check it out.

By: Adam Rice

Adam Rice — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 18:31:12 +0000

I’m really not sure about this, because I haven’t used iPhoto much myself, but I think that it is storing multiple copies of each file–sort of a CVS for JPGs. I’m surprised to hear that the bloat is so great on *uploaded* files though–I would think it would flatten all that out before uploading. I’ve recently discovered PictureSync (http://holocore.com/?PictureSync), and I wonder if that does anything to help.

I’ve been using Graphic Converter (http://lemkesoft.com/en/graphcon.htm) to manage my photos. The interface isn’t nearly as whizzy, but it gives good hooks to IPTC tagging (which PictureSync uses when uploading) and is generally an indispensible program.