Somedays I feel like the only person who is disappointed with iPhoto ’09. When announced at the keynote, I literally thought Apple read my mind as to features I lusted for, and was at least 2 years late (2006: Riya was beta testing searching via face recognition, and Flickr had geotagging). The delivery effort been noble, but the delivery less than spectacular in four areas that I find most important: Places, Faces, Flickr Integration and Photobooks.
Places
Places is, by far, the biggest disappointment. The whole point of geotagging is not just remembering where you took your entire days worth of pictures, but which pic you took on a specific street corner. iPhoto’s initial splash map destorys that experience. Places aggregates your pictures into pins and summarizes by area.
Clicking on a specific pin reveals the name, and then if you want more details, click on the area name – you’re thrown into seeing all the pictures you took in the vicinity of the pin. Zooming in does no good, as you still see the distinct pin but still need to go to the “location” mini-set.
Yes, I understand that flipping an individual picture will reveal where you took it. But if you do that, you lose the charm of geotagging – watching your progression on chronologically, from intersection to intersection.
How to fix Places: don’t dumb down the aggregation by affixing pins. Use some computer power and generate thumbnails for those pins. Take a note from Google Earth’s readability of GeoRSS, or even Flickr. Places shouldn’t be a board on the wall; it should be a new way to tell stories.
Faces
Faces is the next big thing that was a let down. First off, tagging faces and being restricted to only clicking, double clicking or dragging to approve and reject is plain criminal. Whatever happened to keyboard tagging? How about a tagging mode where all you do is tag pictures in a roll or coverflow style? It’s unintuitive the way it is now, and if people have to watch a video to learn how to use it, then Apple has certainly missed the boat.
Faces must also realize my life is so plain and drab, because it acts as great entertainment when identifying people. No iPhoto, Jon doesn’t look like Michelle. No iPhoto, that tire isn’t a face. Not the doorknob either. And definitely not the sushi roll. Facial recognition didn’t improve after training either, as it constantly got confused between myself, Michelle and two others. It was amusing to start, but after awhile rejecting pictures became a chore and lost it’s “wow” moments.
Flickr Integration
Flickr Integration was surpising, since we all thought Apple would tether iPhoto to MobileMe forever. What’s cool about the new Flickr integration is that it’s dynamically updated – you essentially make a new album, and drag pictures into it. Titles and tags are updated both ways, so if you prefer to tag in Flickr, good on you. Geo data gets brought into Flickr as well, so you can use Flickr’s better mapping technology (abiet on Yahoo maps).
The downside is that iPhoto ties so tightly with Flickr that if you delete pictures from iPhoto, then they disappear from Flickr. This makes sense until you run out of hard disk space – when I run out of space, one of my cleanup spots is iPhoto, where archiving and deleting pictures is a common event. I want to be able to delete pictures without affecting Flickr; the only way to do so currently is to unauthorize iPhoto first to break the link to Flickr, delete the pictures, then reauthenticate. The lack of documentation over this adds to the drama and chore.
Photobooks
My last gripe, iPhoto books. Nothing wrong with the design phase of the books and customer service (5 unique books and counting, love customer service to bits). I am even okay with the premium price and the Apple logo at the back of the book. But it’s time to axe the 100 page limit and introduce larger book sizes. Book sizes like Blurb and MyPublisher (and Apple, I know you outsource to MyPublisher). Heck, put your heart out and add the ability to customize books like Aperture. But if you need to prioritize, let us select a nice 13″ by 11″ or 15″ by 11.5″ book and fill it with 200 beautiful pages.
Apple, just do these things and iPhoto will be worthy of the 2009 label.