iPhoto 5 Annoyances
I didn’t like early versions of iPhoto at all, but iPhoto 5, was, I think a big improvement. Now it does most of what I want, and it mostly stays out of my way. There are, however, a few things that consistently bother me and that I hope will be addressed in version 6:
- It’s not possible to edit roll names or photo titles by clicking on them directly. Instead, you have to go through the Information pane.
- Contextual menus appear on mouse-up rather than mouse-down.
- The preferences window is modal, but doesn’t look like it. (Normally, modal windows, like the iTunes preferences, have OK and Cancel buttons. The iPhoto preferences look like the Mail preferences but don’t behave like them.)
- Often, in the middle of editing a photo, I use the Duplicate command to make a backup. iPhoto switches to an “Importing Photos” source, then takes me back to the library. There’s no way to get back to the edit view where I was; that context is lost. I think duplicating should happen in the background, like in the Finder.
- I use the Undo command all the time when cropping. True, iPhoto fades out the cropped-out portions of the image, but it’s not until I click the Crop button that I see exactly what the image will look like. Often, it’s not quite right and so I Undo. But then iPhoto takes me back to the original image, sans cropping rectangle. All I wanted was make a small adjustment to the crop, but it makes me start over.
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> Contextual menus appear on mouse-up rather than mouse-down.
I can't seem to reproduce this. Is this accurate?
Drew: I was referring to the contextual menus in the photo pane. In the source list, they correctly appear on mouse-down.
Michael: Ah ha, I was using a Mighty Mouse and that works great. Control-clicking works everywhere except the non-editing photo view, where it works exactly as you describe.
I'm filing this as bug with Apple and I hope others will too.
Man, that is a lot to go through to leave a comment.
Since you are talking about iPhoto 5, I am curious about the amount of private memory it uses on your system. I have a library of over 8,000 photos and it usually starts around 250MB, but it will climb up over 500MB when I start editing photos. I've tried rebuilding the library (and of course everything else you can do to speed it up - turn off shadows, view in rolls) and that did nothing. Then I started a new library for my new photos to see if that would make a difference and with over a 1,000 photos in that, the memory usage was about the same. When I went through and started editing a bunch of them, I was able to get it over 500MB and it would never drop below 200-300MB. My brother has an equivalent number of photos in iPhoto 4 and it uses about 60MB.
Does iPhoto suck up a huge amount of memory for you or is there just something weird with my install? I've switched to Aperture and that seems to be quite a bit more consistent in its memory usage.
Sorry about that, Nathan. It really cuts down on comment spam.
I have about 7000 photos in iPhoto. It uses 130 MB after launch, and about 160 MB during editing.
nathan/Michael: what camera brand are you using? I recently dioscovered that certain brands have extraneous (40kb) EXIF data that is unused but stored by iPhoto. My Pentax Optio S4 is one such camera.
http://anders.hultman.nu/data/exifcleaner/
The solution is to extract all your photos, clean them with ExifCleaner and then reimport them. You'll lose your albums, but most of mine could be recreated using Smart Albums and a range of dates.
I'm currently finishing off a utility that can be set to auto run on connection of your camera (through Image Capture preferences) which will clean your photos directly on your memory card and then start iPhoto where you can import them safely without bloat.
