iPhoto frustration
2005-09-26 17:00:23
I've just about had it with iPhoto. It does some things very well, like organize and order the bound photo books that Apple sells. However, if you have a lot of pictures, it really starts to break down. I don't even think I have a lot, at least not in this age of digital cameras. I have about 6 years worth of pictures in my iPhoto, which is about 5,000.
iPhoto does weird stuff with caching at different resolutions. It winds up sucking down vast quantities of CPU time just to display thumbnails.
Then there is the bigger problem, in that it keeps all the JPG files inside its own little directory tree. Normally, that's not a big deal, but when I moved my photo library from my old G4 Cube to my new Mac Mini, iPhoto decided to make double copies of thousands and thousands of files. Not all of them, mind you; just about 2-3000 of them. So now my carefully maintained photo db is a mess.
I want a separate photo database program that will look at a hiearchy of JPEGs, inspect the JFIF info, and keep track of them by some reasonable unique ID number. Maybe some message digest of the JFIF info, if not the entire file. Is that so hard? I would be perfectly happy if that program even launched external programs for editing.
Why can't google release picasa for mac?