IPhoto'11 - a disappointment.

Question

hello all!
even though i use iPhoto privately, i have some experience in organizing of and working with a large amount of photos in my job. also i would call myself as a rather advanced computer user.
recently i got this new macbook pro and decided to take th offer of apple to buy iLife '11 as a chaep update to preinstalles iLife '09. that was a mistake.
first of all it is very slow and transforms your whole iPhoto library into an iPhoto '11 library, that is not backward compatible. uff!
if i press control-I the common info shortcut i get useless information about tags, faces and places, that take ages to load. adn take a lot of space of the screen.
if i want to print a picture, that was taken in "wide" mode in the format that it was taken (leaving a white border on top an botton) that is simply not possible. had to copy it to desktop and print from preview. good concept, apple!
and another thing: when i insert my sd card (16GB) that i do not empty everytime for backup reasons - i guess i'm not the only one in the world who does that - iPhoto has to read every single picture of the 2000 something and is not able to skip the pictures that were already imported previously into iphoto before doing this. so a typical procedure is: waiting 10minutes for iPhoto, importing with the option "do not import pictures that were already imported" enabled, inding all the pictures that you deleted imported again - nice!
i came to copying the hand-selected pictures to desktop first an then importing them to iPhoto (also very much in accordance with iPhoto's concept of not having to touch anything internal) as the better of two bad soluions.
so i dont suggest anyone to get iPhoto'11, it is not a bit better/faster/more beatiful that its predecessor and really shook my trust in apple to constantly improve things, what still is definitely true with iTunes, th OS in generall, Preview and all the little things. i will stop using iPhoto as soon as possible!
florian
ps. if its all my mistake/inflexibility/wanting the wrong thing i honestly apologize, but my suspicion is also that apple wants to decrease quality of iPhoto to sell more of Aperture. is this thing better?

Answer 1

i think it is a bit about the "professionality" that i would have liked to feel in iPhoto,
But iPhoto is not an Professional app. It's aimed at the folks with a point and shoot or even a phone camera who want to have easy uploading to Facebook, Flickr and emailing so that they can share their pics quick with their pals and the new baby's grandparents. That's the target audience. And that's most photographers. So, in iPhoto, it's been a while since printing has been warmed over - why, because these folks hardly ever print.
Everything after that - books, cards, slideshows - are designed around fixed templates. This means the user has to make less choices and so can create something that looks well and do it very quickly.
for me the whole mac world used to be "cool" in a sense that somebody knowing about things (design in that case) would suggest good things and leave bad things (like common, cheap, amateur-like propositions) out of the system.
Well, taste is a curious thing. I find your disdain for capital letters at the start of sentences to be lazy at best and rude at worst. I'm sure you have a good reason for writing that way. Maybe your shift key s broken. So, I get over it. Similarly with iPhoto you can ignore and not use any of the bits you dislike. Want to make a slideshow that uses no template? Use another app - and guess what... they all integrate with iPhoto. Don't like the book template? Make your own in Quark or InDesign and they integrate with iPhoto too.
Printing - as opposed to making a keepsake - like in every Mac app - is under the File menu. Advanced computer users would know that
Regards
TD