Digital Home Thoughts: iLife '04 Retrospective

iPhoto 4


Product Category: Software
Company: Apple
Price: $49, part of iLife suite
System Requirements: (PC) Windows XP or 2000. Mac OSX.

Pros:

• Excellent user interface
  
• Simple to use
  
• Photo books
  
• Versatile album creation and management

Cons:

• Sluggish performance, especially when navigating photo thumbnails
  
• Weak photo editing tools
  
• Limited effects
  
• Photo book feature lacks choices in size formats

Summary:
iPhoto offers a complete solution for Mac users to manage, edit, and organize digital photo collections. And it’s easy to use. But it does have a few niggling shortcomings.

I Took How Many Pictures!?!
The first thing you’ll notice about iPhoto is the intuitive interface. Apple did a fantastic job designing this app. So many commercial photo applications are poorly designed, or difficult to grasp. Not so with iPhoto. The main window shows you a gallery view of all your photographs displayed as thumbnails which can be scaled to any size preference. This is a neat feature, but it needs a lot of work. Scrolling down a very large list of thumbnails can bog your system down. It will be interesting to see if iPhoto 5 fixes this problem.


Figure 1: iPhoto interface

Below that is a logically designed context-sensitive toolbar that changes with each function. You have four buttons that carry out iPhoto’s primary functions; Import, Organize, Edit, and Book. They serve as iPhoto’s main reason for being, as these are the most common tasks of digital photography.

Importing photos into your Mac couldn’t be any simpler. Just plug in your digital camera’s USB connector to any Mac, and iPhoto will automatically launch. At that point you are presented with basic options like allowing the camera to delete all images in memory once the transfer is complete. After that, you simply create a new album to store the photos for better organization. From the organize window you can apply any number of set tasks with each individual photo, or the entire collection…such as printing, displaying an animated slideshow, email photos to a friend, order prints online, order a photo book (more on that later), display images on your .Mac homepage (or a .Mac slideshow), or even burn the photos onto a DVD via the included iDVD software.

Editing


Figure 2: Photo editing

Of course, no photo software is worth its weight in gold without the ability to edit or touch up digital photos. And this is where iPhoto starts coming up short of the mark. Rather than empowering its software with a robust set of editing tools and effects, Apple chose the simple route. This approach has its tradeoffs and benefits. By limiting these functions, iPhoto remains simple to understand for the mainstream users. But the obvious downside is that its editing capabilities are far less robust than competing commercial apps like those found in Microsoft’s Digital Image Suite 10 for example.

iPhoto offers just a handful of basic enhancement functions. These include the ability to crop an image, or enhance it with the mysterious “ehance” and “retouch” functions. You can also change the image to black & white, or give it sepia effect, which can come in handy for giving photos a vintage look. Beyond that, you can change the contrast and brightness levels…but that’s about it. A rather disappointing set of editing features for an otherwise stellar iLife app.

But enough of my rant about editing, or lack thereof.

Photo Books


Figure 3: Photo book design

Arguably the best feature in iPhoto is its ability create photo books. This feature alone makes it a killer app among its contemporaries, though Paint Shop Pro Studio for Windows from JASC also offers similar photobook integration. What is a photo book, you ask? Put simply, it is a hardbound coffee table book featuring all of your photos with captions, professionally illustrated and printed by Apple (via MyPublisher.com). The versatility of this tool is phenomenal. You can take any photo collection and turn it into a collage, with your own captions and text printed next to each item. Photos are printed on beautiful high quality acid-free paper. You can choose from one of several different creative layout styles including Catalog, Classic, Collage, Picture book, Portfolio, Story book, and Year book. The possibilities are endless. And iPhoto makes the task of assembling a photo book simple and painless…not to mention fun!


Figure 3: Sample photo book project 1


Figure 4: Sample photo book project 2

I tested this feature out earlier this year when I made a photo book for my Dad as a Father's Day gift, featuring his antique wood car collection (it’s a hobby of his). The results were impressive, and everyone seemed to enjoy the experience of viewing the book. They were all genuinely stunned when I told them I designed and assembled the book on my iMac, not knowing that such a creation was possible on a computer. Image quality looked good, though a bit grainy in some images. I suspect the quality of prints depends largely on image quality. So I highly recommend that you put extra effort into correcting and tweaking your photos before sending them off for publishing.

This beyond all other features offered by iPhoto makes iLife worth its price tag. While you can still make your own photo books online from MyPublisher.com with any PC or Mac (sans iPhoto), it’s the way iPhoto integrates and manages the experience end to end which can’t be beat.

That said, I do have one gripe. At the present, you can’t select from different book formats and styles beyond those offered in the software. iPhoto only allows you to print hardbound books, not softcover or photo sized prints, which could save you some money in the end because hardbound editions are more expensive by comparison. I’d really like to see Apple extend this feature in future iPhoto releases as it would make the photo book tool far more versatile.

Despite that rather minor quibble, I can’t stress enough just how good the Photo book feature is. It’s a fantastic tool for amateur photographers and advanced users alike.

Conclusion
iPhoto is perhaps the best application included in iLife. It brings simplicity to the seemingly laborious task of importing, organizing, editing digital photos and makes it painless and fun for mainstream users. And that’s what digital media is all about; empowering the masses. While I do have a couple complaints about lacking editing components, I give it high marks nevertheless for its ingenious design and utility.