Here's a quick outline of what I've found so far:
iLife ’06 / iPhoto ’06
The new iLife suite for Mac OSX Tiger has just been released with a host of new features of interest to most photographers, in particular iWeb and Photocasting.
Firstly the improvements to iPhoto now means the ability to store & catalogue 250,000 images in iPhoto and catalogue accordingly. When you scroll through the library a translucent scroll guide appears giving the name of the roll (which you can name as you import images) and also the date. In addition key word searches can be performed. Overall the speed of imports, especially raw images has been improved, making it a better tool to use.
My most frequent moan about iPhoto has also been dealt with – the ability to view images full screen, also added is a loupe tool allowing magnification of up to 300% (I think) in specific areas.
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The ability to compare pics side by side is a welcome addition, as is a quick & easy effects palette, giving effects such as sepia, antique, mono, more colour and less colour – this feature will obviously benefit the small user without the benefit of technical knowledge or a bespoke programme such as Photoshop.
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The old benefits of iPhoto still remain with the options to create & buy printed albums with a minimum of fuss and maximum impact, the addition of some new templates freshen this up. To date I have made & bought 4 albums from Apple and the quality is excellent. What has been added is the ability to quickly & easily make calendars, greeting cards, postcards, etc.
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The ‘send slideshow to IDVD’ is still there and remains a great way to burn your images to dvd with music added from your music library – the dvd’s will play in any home dvd player.
One of the new features will mean more pics published to the web - Photocasting. The ability to send your pics to your mac homepage if you have a dot mac e-mail account. All very simply done, create an album and hit the photocast button, then choose what size of images you wish to put online and iPhoto automatically sends your pics to a page designated to you from your dotmac account. As far as I am aware this feature will only work with a dot mac account. The albums automatically include an rss feed which updates the pics when you change or add pics in iPhoto. It is also possible to share photocast albums directly into other iPhoto users macs by subscribing to the rss feed. The online page is viewable by PC users also. This page should hopefully be viewable:
feed://web.mac.com/nadeemb/iPhoto/maldives-1/index.rss
iWeb also creates albums online for iPhoto users with dot mac accounts, giving a range of templates to choose from – this feature I haven’t tested as yet.
Overall a greatly improved package with a lot of features borrowed from big brother Aperture,faster speeds in downloading images and carrying out changes has made it more useable (especially with RAW images). For a lot of Mac users this will be a welcome improvement but by no means is it a ‘one stop’ editing & storage programme for the professional or keen amateur. Having said that, it certainly will have its place on my mac and for sheer ease of use, iPhoto will continue to be my picture library of convenience.
