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

[user]

well if you are going to rant then i am too ...

i love iphoto to death, but not mac. i found this site searching for something to replace iphoto as i switch back to pc. i too have had the same problems with iphoto and itunes (80+ gb of audio). there is a solution for iphoto, it's called iphoto buddy, and it's basically a launcher for iphoto that lets you select a seperate root library, so you could seperate, for instance, business and personal images, or stock photos. unlike just about every other application for apple, it's free

http://www.nofences.net/iphotoBuddy/

it's a tricky way to increase the performance of iphoto, but it offers quite a few options i wish were included in iphoto, like password protected libraries. iphoto has stayed the same, but itunes gets worse with every revision. every time itunes switches songs my system is completely unresponsive for about one second. (and now i get spammed right in itunes too -- thanks apple) how much the worse for itunes on a pc, it's quite a feat to bring my dual core into to a wall of mud, but apple seems to have perfected it.

at one time, i loved macs, and i was an apple fanatic. i got to the point of getting rid of all my non-apple systems, and that was what broke it. i have yet to find a redemptive quality in apple. i have even less good to say about the apple community, which seems to be made up of "mac apologists" -- read propagandist. it seems like apple has created some kind of fanaticism, which explains why they've been able to hold a tiny slice of the market for so long.

the end result of this is that apple does whatever they can in the way of "thinking different" creating a feeling of prestige in it's users by charging ridiculous prices for inferior hardware, and making poor decisions all around. forcing "features" and "standards" on it's entire community. on top of the of the actual product is the actual propaganda -- every apple campaign contradicts the previous one, so which one is a lie? thinking different on the part of apple usually involves them doing something like using an intel core duo to christen another titanic -- how long did we wait for tiger and 64 bit support, and now it's all on the scrap heap, they didn't just switch to intel the switched to the most low rent intel cpu's available -- a step away from a dual core celeron -- a very different decision, now they are going to have to come up with a reson for gouging us on what amounts to a gateway profile, or a low end laptop

in the apple community, there are fanatics (formerly me) and mac hating trolls (me now), and not very many people other than that. objectivity is impossible to find in the apple community and free software is even harder to come by -- every time i want to play solitaire some one is trying to con me out of $15. i really thought that apple would blossom into the foundation of the digital utopia everyone was promised in the mid 90's, but 5 years of os x and still nothing.

[Chris]

IPhoto has, at apparently random times, just overwritten several of my image files with unusable empty files. This is on a normal installation, and with maybe 2000 photos. This is obviously unacceptable behavior for a real-world program. I can't wait until I get off the road and return to my reliable PC, which doesn't randomly destroy my photographs.

[eww iphoto]

after reading everyone elses complaints against i(crap)photo i think im going to move all of my photos into the good ol PC like file folders created by myself. i dont want to lose anything and i am sick of how retardedly buggy and slow the program is and has been becoming. it's amazing how lazy apple is with photo management. it's surprisingly pathetic ...
i hope it isn't a sign of what's coming next.

[curt]

lol I too searched for "iPhoto sucks" and wound up here.

Mac OS X doesn't seem to allow me to change memory allocation the way I could in OS 9. So I have to trust that it is setting aside enough space for each program as it runs. This makes me suspicious.

iPhoto has been increasingly slow and troublesome over the past year. When I had about 8,000 photos needing 10 gigs of memory, I began receiving error messages "There is not enough disk space to complete that operation." when I tried to Export batches of images.

I drastically edited and reduced the number of images. Currently have 3,000 images requiring 6 gigs. And I am still getting the same error when I try to export a batch of about 300 photos (900 megs). iphoto library is on a separate drive with 60 gigs of space available. iPhoto application is on a drive with 1.7 Gigs of free space. I am running on G3 266 mhz 448 megs ram. Old I know, but why is it getting slower? and balking at smaller and smaller libraries.

Someone mentioned that the library does not truly delete files, but merely makes them invisible. If that is the case, then no wonder it is getting so constipated.

It is so freaking slow. Yesterday I was trying to edit a batch of wedding photos. It took 12 HOURS to perform a rough edit on 1000 images. Just trying to select, blow it up to see if it is sharp and then throw it away takes forever. Had I shot film I could have edited the entire project in 2 hours.

I am at the end of my rope. It is my sincere hope that Apple will monitor this post and take it to heart.

[some guy]

since i have switched to OS X, i HATE iPhoto and i could never get used to it , its an application made the way RETARDS thinks and acts. i pray google to make Picasa2 available for os X PLEASE

[picasa 2]

please, go sign: http://www.petitiononline.com/picasa2x/petition.html

[Derek Wright]

Iphoto is the worst program on the mac. Trying to load photos from a Canon 350D is damn near impossible. Takes about 5 minutes of spinning color wheel before anything happens. What a joke. stick with a pc if you're using a pro or semi pro camera.

[GRIZZBAR]

Add this one to the ever growing list of disgruntled i-photo users, but with a slight twist. I will go on the record: MAC COMPUTERS SUCK!!! I have been a faithfull user of IBM computers and always will. Why? BECAUSE MAC COMPUTERS ALL SUCK!! But there's more to this "why"-photo than meets the eye! Let me explain... I work in a dry lab - that's a photoshop that uses no chemistry, all of our prints are done digitally with high-end dye sublimation printers. But, before I worked as a printer on a real, honest to Murgatroid color printer, you know the kind that prints from those weird things people don't use any more, um NEGATIVES, yeah, that's right. Anyway, whenever I got a CD that had an "i-photo" file folder on it, it was, "STOP THE PRESSES!!! WE'RE PRINTIN' I-PHOTO, NOW!!" I had to go to another computer and open countless numbers of folders and subfolder just to get to the files the customer wanted me to print. I will go on the record and say that "I-Puto" was invented for one reason: Steve Jobs wanted to get back at Noritsu for choosing IBM interfaces over Macs for their Mini-Lab printers, the ones the old One Hour Photo labs used. I actually worked at one lab that the owner had a standing order, "NO I-PHOTO DISCS!!" Really! He refused to print from "i-proto", completely. We have photo "kiosks" at our location and bless our little stars we can program them for printing from i-phutzo discs. In the old days we had one printer of dubious mentality who would print every image on the i-scroto disc, good and bad. That's the other problem with "i-phrodo" discs: thumbnails. In the cracked wisdom of the geeks at Apple they made the thumbnail files in "i-hoto" with the same file name as the regular file: at least that's how it shows up on all IBM computers. That means when our old techno-challenged photo finisher had a disc with 400 good files on it, they would print all 800 images, half of them at such a low resolution they were not worth selling. I-photo is about as useless a program as they come, and most professional photographers don't use it, preferring to save their images ON CD or DVD and NOT ON YOUR HARD DRIVE!!! As I like to say at the front counter to those of you who store your entire photo gallery from the last 15 years on your hard drive: You would never take pictures on a 35mm roll of film and just leave it on the shelf, would you? NO! You would get it processed immediately, like it says on the film box. Now, when you shoot an image on your digital camera and either leave it on the chip or store it on your hard drive what are you doing? Essentially, LEAVING IT ON THE SHELF! Transfer the image to a CD and it's just like prosessing the negs: safe and transportable. Okay, now you guys can bag on me for being a Mac-Hater. But what I always say, "Yeah, go ahead and line Steve Jobs' pocket with money for something you can get for half the price in an IBM." And, yes I have worked on a Mac computer and they are the most useless boxes of excrement on the planet! That is if you want to do photography. For video editing or music programs I have heard they are pretty good, so see! At least there's still some hope for me yet!