iPhoto 09: Nice Ideas, Shame About The Eye Candy
10:15 am, January 29th, 2009, Giles Turnbull
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.
Posted by Giles Turnbull in Reviews, Software | Comment on this article
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I gave iPhote a shot when it was first released. It failed! I tried it after the first update again and it failed again. Since then I’m not interested anymore.
Unlike iTunes it creates a bunch of additional files (thumbnails, data bases, etc.) which take occupied many GB’s on my hard drive. Also I bundle my photos in folders together with films I made the same day. My hard drive wouldn’t be big enough anyway.
To browse through my photos I can use Spotlight on my external drobo, I find all persons (because I labeled the folders with their names) and it all is “2009_01_29_Sorted_by_date”. So no need for eye candy for me. ; )
Tice, on January 29th, 2009 at 10:56 am
I love your blog except when you say anything negative about an apple product. I feel that if you are promoting the Mac “Cult” then you are a apple Fan end to end.
KaL MichaeL, on January 29th, 2009 at 11:24 am
I am eagerly awaiting my delivery from Amazon of iLife 09 and have to admit being a little disappointed to read negative reviews such as this before I get to have a go at it.
Hopefully my iMac may cope better than Giles’ Macbook ?
If disk arrives tomorrow and I get a go over the weekend I will drop back here and leave my thoughts.
Cheers
Scott, on January 29th, 2009 at 11:25 am
Giles, what is the speed, RAM, etc of your MacBook? Not that I doubt your findings, I’m just curious how others will fare with a more processor intensive iPhoto.
Kevin R., on January 29th, 2009 at 11:33 am
GarageBand’s even worse, bringing my MacBook to a grinding halt. I know it has more features than GB ’08, but this is absurd.
Craig Grannell, on January 29th, 2009 at 11:37 am
Man that’s a shame.
Here’s the thing though: is it just me or does Apple seem to go out of their way to make communication with third party apps/websites/companies via their own software as basic and un-customiseable as possible? There’s so many third party Flickr utilities for Mac and even for iPhoto that offer loads of customisation options? Why do Apple always dumb down to the lowest possible point? Same thing happened with their screens – “Our customers tell us they LOVE the glossy screens!” – well that’s because you only asked people who use them in dark rooms, for surfing the web and looking at their photos on iPhoto.
And what about MMS? Standard on every single phone on every single network, but not Apple, ohhhhhh no, they seem to think the future is everyone with email-enabled mobiles. Well that may well be, but it isn’t the present and you aren’t God. I need MMS.
Madness. They P*SS me off an awful lot, and yet I do love them so.
owen-b, on January 29th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
I’m running a quad-core XEON Mac Pro with 6 GB of RAM and over 3 TB of hard drive space. My video card has 512 MB of VRAM.
iPhoto ‘09 is AMAZINGLY slow on my machine, and it’s been a real pain to work with.
Clearly, something is wrong here. This is more than “eye candy is hard to render.” Hopefully these are bugs that will be ironed out in future updates. I don’t know…maybe ‘09 is meant to be used with Snow Leopard?
Jeff, on January 29th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
My copy of iLife 09 arrives tomorrow. I’m seriously hoping you’re all magically wrong about the speed.
I’ll give it a try anyway – I want the music lessons, dammit! But I’ll be prepared to do a Time Machine restore just in case.
Thanks for the heads up.
Julie Gomoll, on January 29th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
“In the meantime though, I’m a bit of a grumpy one, and wishing I was still using iLife 08.”
Is something stopping you from going back?
Mark, on January 29th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Well….I have a MBP Unibody, 512, 320, 4gb ram….and iPhoto is doing great. No hiccups, crashes, delays…..and fans are normal. Hmmm…. So far I’m enjoying the new iLife, but we’ll see. I’ll keep you posted.
Fats Vernon, on January 29th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
I have no idea what you are talking about. iPhoto for me works great. I have been blown away by the face recognition. Opening photos for editing etc puts no stress on my 2.5 year old iMac.
Very very happy with iLife 09 so far (iPhoto and iMovie).
Kuma, on January 29th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
I feel the same about the Flickr thing. I had to reinstall the FFXporter plugin, so I could upload individual photos.
BobMac, on January 30th, 2009 at 11:14 am
A bushel of wheat, five gold coins and a suckling pig to anyone who can figure out the Terminal commands to turn off all the superfluous visual effects
opti, on January 30th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
I would be as frustrated as you are if I was seeing the same thing. However, I’ve noticed no difference in iPhoto speed from 08 to 09. The thing flies on my machine (unibody MacBook).
To be honest, when I read your article I had to check on the animation for viewing/editing, because it was so smooth I simply hadn’t noticed it when working with 09 this week.
Is your library huge? Mine’s a pretty modest 2,500 photos. But editing, scrolling, searches, my smart albums, slideshows, etc. are all every bit as fast as with 08.
Tom, on January 30th, 2009 at 9:41 pm
Just loaded Iphoto 09. Install was fine @ 20 min start to end). BIG PROBLEMS deleting iphoto events. Every time I try to delete a duplicate event (several photos linked by date) iphoto freezes and I have to reboot. Running a mac mini with 2 gigs of ram,10,000 photos. SO SLOW. HAD NO PROBLEMS WITH IPHOTO 08. THIS IS MADDENING!!!!!
APPLE…PLEASE HELP…..VERY SLOW IPHOTO O9….
KG, on February 2nd, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Brand new Mac Pro — Two 3.2 Ghz Quad Core Xeon, 16Gb RAM, Four 15K hard drives in Raid.
I bought the Mac because of the face recognition. I have 45K photos. iPhoto does do face recognition, but it is getting extremely slow. It is doing face recog. in the background, I think. I can’t empty my trash – 85,000 photos. The program has crashed at least 15 times (in the 10 days since I bought it).
I am a long time PC power user. I’ve always been a big Max fan. I am still naive about the Mac’s settings, but it appears as though I cannot manage minute details. I’d really like to go into the details and delete data elements, but I can’t. Well, I guess that’s the Max philosophy — simplicity.
Face recognition really works. Add only ONE face at a time. If you add a bunch, it will bring the program to its knees quickly.
DonP, on February 11th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
Does anyone know how to delete photos from iphoto and your HD in one shot?
I just got leopard and ilife 09 and thought I could just hold “option and delete” and be done with it like I have in the past. What is the deal with them trying to change things that don’t need changing?!
thanks
van, on February 13th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
I’m in the same boat as KG: I upgraded to iPhoto 09 a couple of weeks ago. Faces was fun for a day or so, but now I really wish I had stayed with 08.
This app is so SLOOOOOW. Painful. Initial load takes absolutely inordinate amount of time. I get spinning beach ball all the time. And worst of all, I CANNOT DELETE IMAGES any more. Machine hangs every time.
iPhoto 09 seems to use a huge amount of disc space when it is open – read/write activity is non-stop. Sometimes available HD space drops several Gig when iPhoto is open.
26,000 images in my iPhoto library. MPB, 2.4 GHz Duo Core w/ 2GB RAM
I’ve been a Mac user for more than 20 years, this is certainly one of the worst application upgrade experiences I’ve ever had.
BS, on February 28th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
I added Ilife 09 with a Power PC Dual 1.8, and 2 gig mem. Plenty of HDD space, and the package upgrade is great, but such a dog on the machine. 08 worked great, this has made using the package less attractive.
Joe, on March 3rd, 2009 at 5:40 am