When the new iLife 09 package was announced, I was pretty keen to get my hands on a copy. Some of the features in iPhoto – face recognition, photos on maps – looked too good to be true.
Turns out they *were* too good to be true.
Now that iPhoto 09 has “upgraded” my photo library, I’m cursing myself for installing it. Allow me to explain why.
I *do* like the new features. The face recognition is a little haphazard, but it works most of the time. Seeing photos mapped is also very cool and a great idea for browsing through a large collection.
But you pay a price for these new features. iPhoto 09 includes plenty of new eye candy and interface snazz which is having a detrimental effect on my photo browsing. Photos now animate into view when selected for editing or viewed full-screen. Each photo can be flipped upside down to add metadata, an idea copied from Dashboard widget behavior.
The net result of all this animated swishery is my MacBook’s fans going bananas, and the machine slowing down noticeably when I’m browsing or editing. Frustrating doesn’t cover it: this is maddening, when I stop to consider how smooth and easy and processor-friendly everything was with iPhoto 08.
Another frustration (a minor one, I’ll concede) is that the built-in Flickr upload offers very little in the way of options. Every upload creates a new Flickr set, even if you’re uploading just one image.
What seems to be missing, in my view, is some flexibility in the preferences. If I could simply switch off the eye candy, and tweak the Flickr upload defaults, I’d be a much happier bunny.
In the meantime though, I’m a bit of a grumpy one, and wishing I was still using iLife 08.
I think I need a beer. Yes.
