iPhoto sucks

This is just a little stream of consciousness on the fact that I hate iPhoto.  This little rant is totally unedited right from my brain and might not make much sense. 

I've been trying to help my father transfer all of his photos from his old computers (windoz) onto his G5 and I've come to the conclusion that iPhoto sucks.  It's especially suckage for people comfortable managing their photos with Window$ XP.  In fact iPhoto sucks for anyone with lots of images.  It seems anything over like 25 000 images and it becomes useless even on dual 2 G5s.

Windows users are familiar with organizing their photos into folders and when they get into iPhoto they assume its the same way.  What they don't know is that iPhoto creates its own file system based on the EXIF data (date and time the images we're taken/modified) within the photo and stores photos in its own bizzarre system.  So they go about trying to save all their images in folders in the "pictures" folder in OSX and they wonder why they don't show up in iPhoto.  What they don't understand is that iPhoto is designed to organize your photos for you. 

In an effort to simplify the organizing of photos and protect stupid users from themselves apple has created a mess of a folder system for iPhoto.  If you take a photo on January 5th 2005 the folder in which iPhoto will store your images is

harddrive/users/username/pictures/iphoto library/2005/01/05/actualpicture

but you aren't supposed to mess with the photos here.  you are supposed to do all your organizing from within iphoto.  but people don't know that coming from the XP "my pictures" folder world.

If you're used to XP it makes sense to put pictures in the "iphoto library" folder but all it does is screw things up in iPhoto.

Another problem is that once you've figured out that iPhoto is supposed to organize your photos for you, you realize that the system that does the organizing is totally flawed.  How many people other than us nerds actually read the manual and set the time/date on our digital cameras?  The whole iPhoto system is based on this idea that the EXIF data that is created when you take a photo is correct.  From my experience hardly anybody sets the date and time correctly on their digital cameras.  Even if they do they lose the date and time when the batteries die on their cameras...

I love the idea of ogranizing everything based on this minimal amount of metadata that we create in our imaging process but it just doesn't work that well in reality.  So in a nutshell I think the whole thing is jacked, whether you're switcher or not.

iPhoto  does excel at certain tasks (making books, slick slideshows, browsing lots of thumbnails quickly, its integration with ilife etc) but for me and my 30-40 000 images its a pain in the ass most of the time.  Slow, crash prone app, with a weird ass file system that makes it impossible to find stuff.

I'm sitting here waiting for a dual 2.5 ghz G5 to import several thousand photos and its just chugging along at a snails pace.  That ain't right.

I guess my point is that if Steve wants to kick Bill's ass he'd better fix iPhoto and fast.  I'm going to stop telling people to buy macs Steve!

(I heard Scoble talking about how some peeps at microsoft actually subscribe to like pubsub feeds and technorati feeds for "Microsoft Sucks", so I'm hoping somebody at apple does the same)

Comments

[JON]

I AGREE ABSOLUTELY!!! First, does he have ilife 05? Its MUCH MUCH better. Second, iphoto still sucks! Ah well...just about everything else about the MAC rules.

JON.

[Duncan]

yeah he has ilife 05

it still sucks

they need to change the entire file system...

[Bill]

Also, when you import a whole slew of photos from your digi and use iphoto to delete the ones that you don't want...they aren't actually deleted. They just no longer show up. So if you're trying to save space on your hard-drive, you're got to go find the pic in that mess of files.

[JON]

no new posts...u must be havin fun in florida! im jealous! out boatin at all??? im back at work and damn tired! arrrghhhh

[Nate]

This is dumb. You want to organize your files into folders no one is stopping you. Finder will let you do that as well as WindowsXP will. I don't get your complaint. Now, if you use iPhoto, and you do not have to, yeah, it is going to organize your photos for you. Is there a free alternative that comes with WindowsXP?

Listen, I am not a Mac Apologist. I like my mac, I only have around 5000 pictures, and iPhoto works fine. When I need a picture I don't care what folder it is in, I just open iPhoto and drag it into Photoshop. Once again, that is because I enjoy the way iPhoto tags and imports. If I didn't, I would just organize my files manually...just like you apparently prefer in Windows.

It is the things people don't understand about iTunes and iPhoto. These are just viewing programs. They are file management programs designed to separate the user from the filesystem. I am pretty techno-saavy, but, to be honest, I am sick of having to know where my files are on the computer. Maybe you'd be happier if you had to flick the little magnetic switches on the hard drive to create and organize your files. Me, i am happy to have my computer do what it was designed to do.

[Duncan]

I never said I wanted to organize my photos in folders. What I said is that Windows users are familiar with organizing their photos into folders and that it's never made apparent that iphoto will sort and store their photos based on the EXIF data in the digital images. As a result they get all messed up when they try to do things with their images in the iphoto file system. Also if and when the date is set incorrecly on their digital camera they will have pictures that are all out of order in iphoto
...

[mik]

I HATE iPHOTO too. my pics are 6MP, takes forever to load or change them. Do you know any other program? in my PC days I used picasa, which is absolutly the best thing ever.

[Duncan]

I don't know of any other good apps on the mac.

Iview Media Pro is supposed to be ok...

I just want iphoto to get better...

[Shag]

I have a cluster muck of pictures imorprted with new iphoto when I upgraded to 10.3. .....oh wow what a mess of duplicates of pics and files and thumbnails ......shees.

It will take me a weekend to harvest all the originals and start over with one big import....therefore losing all the dates and modifications.

Iphoto is crap

[Duncan]

I have thousands of duplicates as well.

So annoying...

[Rahul Iyer]

OK OK...IPhoto does indeed suck...but instead of just ranting...can someone figure out what to actually use instead? I thought about trying Picture Arena...but I don't have time to experiment with stuff...that's why I switched to Mac in the first place!! So...someone do the legwork for me, damnit.

[a.out]

Kodak EasyShare + Gimp 2.0 , which also sucks, but not as much as iPhoto, and at least it's free.

To all you who hate this little piece of crap but feel hostage of this program just because your iphoto.db library has gotten to big there might be a solution, only tested on my pc, but extracts each iphoto roll to a single xml file whith the names and paths for easy retrieval.

I am migrating this to easyshare right now and kicking away iPhoto.

I would gladly share with anyone interesed the source code, which are 3 C simple programs.

An example

strip an iphoto.db to multiple files like this one

"roll####.xml"
-------------------------

Roll tille

518
image path
...path../Thumbs/518.jpg

etc. for each picture

-------------------------

[iphotoconvert]

At first, I agreed with your comments...being that I'm bringing all my media from my Windows XP PC over to my Mac, I was used to the idea of organizing by folders. Funny thing was that I was already organizing them by date anyway. The more I started to play with iPhoto, the more I liked it. I got used to the organization and the different ways you can play with metadata and truly found power in its ability to organize photos. Adding comments, correcting date/time info, batch conversions, web gallery export...all the features I needed in a program.

But dealing with 30,000 some photos is a great deal (compared to my measly 4000), so I guess it works better for those of us who don't need to manage as many photos as you do.

[Photographer]

i agree with the last guy, im a photographer with over 50k images. iphoto is the best! no problems with speed or anything. i think you all need to read the manual and learn how to use the application properly!

[Duncan]

I think you so called "photograher" need to read what I said. I said iphoto sucks for people who are coming over from Windows.

The application is fine if its the only thing you know how to use.

[pane]

iPhoto sucks when you have more than 2500 images to organize. Instead of storing all thumpnails into one file Apple believes it´s more clever to store each thump seperate.
Anyway, the average Macuser is used to wait for his Mac, so this only borthers people that are used to PC speed.

[Lukas]

I agree iphoto sucks so much, and I am so upset.
And Applecare had no help for my situation.

iphoto 05 has DELETED ALL 3000 of my photos from the last year, rendering them into empty files. I bought iLife so that I could organize my photos better; at least before I could veiw them one at a time, but since I had moved the library folder, which I now know is forbidden, to an external drive, all of the pictures became invisible in iPhoto. I had no reason to suspect that IPhoto would manage (mangle!) data in a way different from all other Apple applications. So when I installed the new version, all the old phots went form being unviewable in iphoto but veiwable in other application, to being rendered into empty files.
I am so sad, I don't know how I'm going to break it to my wife, who took nearly all the pictures from our travels. :(

[Fernando]

I have to agree iPhoto sucks. Its slow, it takes a lot of time with a lame "loading photo" text in fast pbooks. And what pisses me off, is that you cant view a photo in full screen without slideshows. Cmon, apple can do better than that. I wish we had a version of Picasa for macos. Lets hope someone ports an opensource version of a decent image viewer. Most mac users are fanatic and kinda blind, I see people saying "Picasa sucks, iPhoto have three times more features", what features? it can download image from the camera, organize them in lame EXIF folders and show them slowly? I bet my MSX can do that.

[Duncan]

Picasa certainly puts iphoto to shame

[Henry]

Yes, iPhoto does suck. The only feature that I enjoy about iPhoto is the speed of organizing pictures, when your library is in the size of < 1000 photos.

I've been using the slideshow feature inside Tiger. It's the menu inside the rotary gear dropdown in a finder window. It works well and has a thumbnails feature too. The bad part is that the slideshow doesn't perform any filename sort on the pictures, so everything goes out of order.

I only advise using the Finder slideshow for fast viewing. It's a free alternative to launching slow ass iPhoto for viewing freshly downloaded camera pics.

[Brian Nation]

IPhoto is so bad it's unbelievable. We're up to version 5 and it gets worse. I've given up on it. It's amazing that Apple could produce OS X - a fantastic system with fanatstic apps and put out a turkey like iPhoto. I got used to the file system (I'm also ex-Windows) and can work with it but the SPEED!!! Ugh! Sloooooow. I'd start it up and go have a coffee while it loaded. Even quitting took forever. Well, for a while I'd been thinking maybe my computer was at fault. A 667Mhz G4 powerbook with 512Mb RAM. But yesterday i got a new Mini - double the speed and same RAM. iPhoto took forever to start up EMPTY. I trashed it. I use iView Media. Even Graphic Converter is a very good alternative.

What's your problem Apple? FIX IPHOTO!!!

[Bruce]

iPhoto has just deleted over 500 images and I've not been able to get them all back. iPhoto absolutely sucks, Apple what are you doing with poor software like this when you are supposed to be market leaders in imaging?????? pi$$ poor!

[Thad]

I have a dual (a DUAL) G5 and fewer than 1000 images and using iPhoto is like going out to breakfast and getting waited on by that one waitress that should have retired 10 years ago. After a while, you just want to get up and leave - or in this case quit the program. If I see that @#$%ing spinning rainbow wheel one more time when I try and page through my photos I'm gonna lose it. Apple's brilliance is often shadowed by well intended products like iPhoto - a seductively styllish program that completely underwhelms in terms of raw functionality - i.e., being able to quickly open, organize, and view photos. After getting pissed again at iPhoto this evening I did a search for "iPhoto sucks" and discovered I, alas we, are not alone.

[CarlosX]

haha... I searched "Iphoto sucks" too.

Ok, the app totally sucks, it creates millions of duplicates and millions of folders that make the app to run very very slow... and that's not impressive at all... what happened in this program? why is it going so wrong? and the worst part is that you can't change a damn thing in preferences menu.

Also, when you connect your camera, you have to import all the pics in it without a preview! What if you don't want them all, but just select one or two? No, you can't, you have to download the 50 pics in your camera! What a drag.

I'm using the software that came with my canon digital camera and it works fine! I'll stay with that until the day IPhoto improves.

What a piece of crap.

[Jay]

I had to give up my windows machine for a short while so my husband can use it in testing. I am back to my mac. I hate iphoto, I was completed spoiled on that wonderful FREE application called Picasa. iphoto is clumsy, slow and low on features. I have set up a spare dell laptop to load photos on till I get my regular pc back. Mac has it's good points, iphoto is not one of them, considering how many people take digital photos you would think they would bring it up to snuff. I tried to find a decent freeware sub for iphoto which is a joke.