iPhoto Deleted My Latest Pictures
posted at 10:04 am
on Oct. 26, 2005
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iPhoto is a hideous piece of software—I think the “i” stands for Irk Me. Tonight, it crashed on me while I was importing photos, and it erased the whole batch of 30 photos. That’s unforgivable behavior—crashing is bad enough, but deleting files before writing the new copies to disk safely is deplorable.
To recover them, I had to buy a piece of software that recovers photos from photo cards. I felt like it was 1991 all over again and I back was recovering term papers from corrupt floppy disks in the campus computer lab. But that’s not the only beef I have with iPhoto.
I recently had to increase the amount of RAM in my computer, not because of any of the other programs I run, hogs like Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Word. No, the problem was iPhoto, which seems incapable of handling a big photo library. It uses more RAM (even when idle) and runs slower than any other program on my computer.
My photo library is currently 13,000 photos. That’s fairly big, I admit that, but it’s not out-of-this-world big. The advice I’ve gotten to deal with iPhoto’s inability to handle my photos—take older photos and break them into separate libraries by year or something—is pretty much unacceptable.
Let’s say I want to find a nice picture of my sister to put on her birthday card. I don’t want to have to look through multiple libraries—it’s a pain in the butt. Or what about if I’m doing a slideshow of past Christmases? Or what if I just want random pictures on my screensaver, from my entire collection?
Frankly, I’m looking for a replacement and I’m open to suggestions.
In the mean time, not that Apple’s listening, but here are some things I’d like to see added to the next iPhoto:
1) Any title, keywords, description, rating, date or other data I add to a photo should be stored in the photo’s IPTC data. As it stands, if my iPhoto database goes sour—and I bet it will, given iPhoto’s flakiness—I will lose every bit of data I’ve typed in. For comaprison, with iTunes, data added via iTunes is also saved in each MP3 file, which means iTunes isn’t the single point of failure, and using those files in other programs is much easier, as an added bonus. Even works well with Spotlight.
2) Better keyword handling. As it exists right now, iPhoto’s keyword system is impossible to use. I’d like to be able to quickly add and remove keywords, without having to use some bizarre interface different, and more awkward than any other product out there. This is a version 5 product, why are the keywords basically unimproved since version 2?
3) Much better saving and rebuilding of the database. Many times, I’ve had iPhoto crash and I’ve lost titles and keywords, or editing I’ve done. Come on, Apple. That’s so lame.
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