I’ve been playing with iPhoto ‘08, part of Apple’s newest iLife release last week. It’s touted as one of the two major changed apps in the package, the other being iMovie ‘08. Both are of importance to digital camera users, and both have a lot to like.

Apple’s own iPhoto site gives an great overview of what’s changed, including brand new tutorial videos that get you up to speed really quickly. So I’ll just quickly mention the important stuff it’s easy to miss, and how the new features actually work in real life.

It’s worth noting that I’m a relatively heavy iPhoto user — I have almost 9,000 photos in my library, including a good number of videos, and I use iPhoto to manage them pretty much exclusively.

GOOD: New Events-based Organization
iPhoto will now automatically group your photos into events (all the photos taken on the same day, same week, or in 2 and 8 hour intervals.) Given the thousands of photos many of us are taking, it’s not a bad idea. Organizing photos into folders takes time, and dozens upon dozens of folders gets messy.

Events works great for most people.

It doesn’t work great if (1) You’re a Project 365‘er, every day becomes a new event, and that’s quickly unmanageable. Similarly, anyone who’s taking pics of daily events or using their cameraphone frequently is likely to find events to be less useful. Luckily, events can be merged, split, and otherwise managed.

My 8,813 photos became 474 events when I started up the new iPhoto. Better than eight thousand pics, but still not scalable. Albums work for a small number of photos, events work for a few thousand. But it’s still a stopgap.

OKAY: Editing tools improved

Not a whole lot to say here. The tools are slightly improved, and shadows and highlights sliders are a welcome addition, and they work pretty well. For most casual photo edits, you don’t really need Photoshop.

GOOD: Tagging in iPhoto ‘08
Tagging (iPhoto calls them keywords) in iPhoto has never been as smooth and easy as on Flickr, but iPhoto improves things dramatically. Here’s how:

• Tags auto-complete as you type them in, you no longer need to use the keywords palette, and you can comma-separate them.
• Oft-used tags can be dragged into the “Quick Group” section for easy selection in the palette. That also means those you can quickly assign those tags to a photo (or group of photos) by holding down option and typing the first letter of the tag.
• If you’re using FlickrExport to send your photos to Flickr, iPhoto tags will carry through in the upload. Sweet. Be sure to pick up the update released a couple days ago to make FlickrExport compatible with iPhoto ‘08.

Other Assorted Changes

• Selective import from camera — many people, myself included, have been using Image Capture to select which photos to import onto their mac, then dragging those into iPhoto. Now iPhoto will let you choose which photos to bring in from your camera instead of grabbing everything.
• Slicker Interface — Double-clicking an image smoothly zooms it into view. Hiding an image (new feature) makes it disappear while other photos slide into their new positions. Events feature back arrows in the header, just like the iPhone.
• It feels fast — It’s still much slower than I’d like, but scrolling around and entering and exiting events does feel a bit faster. (Tested on a MacBook 2.0 GHz)

Overall
I’d still like to see a more Flickr-like calendar view, and greater integration with webservices (Facebook, Flickr sync, including faveing, comments, etc.) would be really great. Apple offers a jazzed up web gallery with their own .Mac service, but it’s not a substitute.

iPhoto alone is probably not worth the $79 iLife upgrade, but it’s not a bad upgrade. It’s a year in coming, and the app does feel smoother, snappier, and more polished.

But Apple, seriously: You’ve got built-in YouTube export in iMovie. You’ve got Google and Yahoo apps in the iPhone. Clearly you understand that there’s a web-baesd ecosystem out there and you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Flickr, Smugmug, and others do a great job letting you share photos on the web and there’s no reason to build a watered-down version on .Mac. Instead, work with these guys to offer a best-of-breed experience for photo-sharing sites on the desktop. That’s what Apple does best, and they ought to do it here.

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