iPhoto 4.0 Review

I was sitting around waiting for iPhoto to come up with an update to make it faster. Then I stumbled across the fact that Apple had made this a paid update. More than a little disappointed, I procrastinated a while before putting up the cash. Although I do have to say iPhoto + iMovie + iDVD + GarageBand for $49 seems very reasonable if you're actually gonna use all of them, or even at least a few of them. I like iPhoto a lot so I pretty much only bought it for that, although I intend to get a digital video camera soon and expect to be making more use of iMovie and iDVD too. GarageBand is kind of fun to fool around with, but I'll probably get into that more later. In any case, while I wish iPhoto were still free, I can understand why a marketing decision like this would be made and I can't complain that much because the price is reasonable.

Software Update should update iPhoto (and other iLife apps) too

As getting better software in and of itself is my focus here, let me get back to that, the iPhoto that came with was 4.0. It seemed to be pretty screwed up. But before I get into that, why doesn't iPhoto get incorporated to Software Update? I dug around a little on the net and discovered that iPhoto 4.0.1 is available for download as an update to 4.0. Software Update didn't catch this but it sure seems like to should have.

This may be because I don't keep iPhoto directly in the Applications folder. I divided all my apps into 6 categories and then use a FruitMenu Apple Menu item to access each of these folders directly. It lets me get to apps faster. (FruitMenu is another favorite app of mine, by the way.) I noticed that this stopped the iPhoto 4.0.1 updater from figuring out where iPhoto was. But come on, how hard is it to look a little farther for the app? If that's the reason why iPhoto doesn't get updated, it needs to be fixed.

What a mess updating the library was in 4.0...

iPhoto 4.0 screws up photos. I say that generally because a quick Google search led me to find those who share(d) in my suffering. Check out this page or this one for some of the others. These were what eventually led me to figure out that 4.0.1 exists. I'm installing that right now. While I'm waiting, let me tell you about the problems.

I don't know exactly what was going on, but I kept getting 77 photos placed in a "Recovered Photos" folder. I couldn't tell if these were actually photos or some other kind of screwed up file, but they all had image names. Some of them had huge amount of memory allocated to them - like numbers with 10 digits. Not sure what the heck that meant. Most of them were just pure black with no image showing up, although 3 of them were images that I could see.

I tried a bunch of things but they kept coming up like that. I tried to just figure out which images they were and take them off of my back up and import then in some other way, but that was proving to be a huge pain in the butt as iPhoto apparently removed them from their original folders and put them in this new one. I could have done it by date, but that would have required me to go through them one by one. If 4.0.1 doesn't work, that's just what I might end up doing.

Oh, and there's a point for you. I conveniently just backed up my computer, including all my iPhoto photo libraries. So I've got them all sitting on my external HD. But I'm sure many users don't have that luxury and are gonna be quite peeved when they find out that a bunch of their photos are simply gone into some dark underworld of iPhoto corrupt photos.

OK, 4.0.1 is taking forever to upload my photos. It seems to be stuck at a certain point and not progressing any farther. I'll get back to you...