iPhoto 08 Improves Digital Image Management

In the past for iPhoto users to load their digital images from a camera or a disk reader, they would plug their device in, iPhoto would launch and an icon of a camera would appear in the middle of the iPhoto window signaling it recognized the card or camera. iPhoto would then provide a button saying IMPORT.

Unfortunately, I often did not need to import all the images on the card or camera. And, although iPhoto was kind enough to prompt you to pass over the duplicates or images you'd previously loaded, the import process was very analog, like the old days when you have to listen to ALL your voice mail messages. iPhoto was very slow if all you needed to load was one or two images from a disk with 100 on it. Scanning a disk and importing the files would take 15 or 20 minutes with todays large storage capacity digital media and large image files. A simple task of shooting a single image, loading it into iPhoto and emailing it to a family member or my publisher was agonizingly cumbersome.

With iPhoto 08 Apple FINALLY fixed this very non-Apple way of forcing the user to follow a protocol rather than given them options to control their digital content. With the upgraded version of iPhoto, when you plug the camera or card in it provides a preview of the entire contents and then allows you to select only a few or all images you wish to import. This is a huge improvement and timesaver over previous iPhoto versions.

Like my raves about getting around to fixing .Mac, I had been writing to Apple and complaining about this problem in iPhoto since version 5 and was disappointed they didn't provide a card browser in iPhoto 6, only to be told that there was a small application to previewing called Image Capture.

In fact, with this upgrade of iPhoto, Apple has made a concerted effort to improve the image management capabilities of the application. The iPhoto teams programming efforts are paying off with better image loading options, more information being captured and stored for each image, the addition of organizing stacks of photos into Events and the ability to hide images you may need to keep for some reason but not want to view.

iPhoto gave us the ability to capture and amass huge libraries of digital images but for most Mac users two, five or even ten thousand images quickly became unmanageable but iPhoto 08 truly improves upon the tasks of managing your ever expanding library of images. Many home and professional photographers will find the iPhoto 08 upgrade essential to their practical management needs.