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The old version toppled over in exhaustion when you told it to sort through 5,000 photos, but the new one zips through collections of 20,000 or more.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T h e   R o a d   L e s s   T r a v e l e d
iPhoto gets a speed boost and other improvements


Feb. 11, 2004


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, The Post-Standard

   I've had a love-hate relationship with iPhoto ever since the day I first tried it. But the latest iPhoto is so much better that all of my ambivalence is gone. iPhoto 4, the current version, is superb.
   Apple's biggest change when it overhauled iPhoto was in the speed department. The old iPhoto ran on four cylinders. The new version has a V12. The old version toppled over in exhaustion when you told it to sort through 5,000 photos, but the new one zips through collections of 20,000 or more.
   I got the latest version of iPhoto as part of iLife '04, the collection of media software Apple is selling for $49. (Most folks call it "iLife 4," but I have the box in front of me as I write this, and it says "iLife '04." Maybe Steve Jobs, who heads both Apple and Pixar, has an "Apostrophe Now" post-Vietnam feature movie in the works.)
   iLife '04 has the new iPhoto along with revised versions of iMovie and iDVD and the new GarageBand music-composing software. GarageBand is a fascinating program; I've tried it out and can hardly hold back my enthusiasm. I'll report on it soon. The revised iMovie and iDVD applications are faster than their predecessors and have enough added features to make an upgrade worthwhile. iLife '04 seems cheap when you consider what you get for your $49.
   iPhoto 4 is so much faster than the older version that I suspect Apple actually redid the underlying code. iPhoto 4 takes advantage of the powerful Quartz Extreme graphics engine in current G4 and G5 Macs to do something no other multi-image program dares to do: All images, whether thumbnails or large, editing-size pictures, are redrawn each time the display changes -- every time you scroll up or down in the thumbnail list, for example. Normally this would cause dreadful slowdowns, but Apple seems to have performed a software miracle in iPhoto 4.
   (I don't want to gloss over this achievement. What Apple has done in iPhoto 4 might be amazing to geek-minded users, but to the rest of us it means that you are always viewing an optimized image in iPhoto. The graphics routines continually check the display and update it for the best possible quality. You can see this in action if you drag the resize slider to the left or right; the thumbnails will snap to their new sizes and they will pop into focus with each new incremented size.)
   Apple says iPhoto 4 can handle up to 25,000 photos in a single library. I copied about 20,000 pictures into iPhoto 4 and created a dozen albums to help sort them all. (Albums don't actually hold images, no matter what iPhoto seems to be doing. They're simply collections of aliases to pictures that are located in the library.) iPhoto 4 didn't seem to slow down at all.
   I love the new rating system in iPhoto 4. While you are viewing a picture in a slideshow, you can press the Cmd key along with a number key (from 0 to 5) to assign a rating to that photo. You can then sort your pictures by your ratings and then create new albums of your highest-rated photos.
   Everything is snappier in the new iPhoto. Serious digital photographers should consider iPhoto 4 an essential tool in organizing their editing work; for that kind of use, it's probably much better than most of the image browsers professionals use.
   Here are a few examples:
   I've set up iPhoto 4 so that double-clicking a thumbnail opens the image in my preferred image editor, Photoshop Elements 2.0. This happens very quickly. When I finish editing the photo and close the file, iPhoto shows the revised thumbnail almost immediately.
   I have icons for my other image editors in the dock. When I don't want to edit an image in Photoshop Elements 2.0, I drag the iPhoto thumbnail down to the dock icon for one of the other applications and drop it there. The other program opens the image.
   I like to make new albums just to sort out certain kinds of pictures. I'm able to make a quick DVD slideshow by selecting an album and clicking the iDVD icon at the bottom.