Review of iPhoto 5.0

(Updated with quick slide show button on 1/27 and on 2/3 with 5.01 release)

Steve Jobs’ introduction of the updated iPhoto in the iLife suite had me salivating immediately. Cutting the price of photo prints in half from 39 cents to 19 cents and offering a zillion new options for photo books (also at lower prices) offered enough benefits to almost cover the cost of buying the update (I did first check to see if lower prices and new book options would appear in the prior version of iPhoto — only the print prices made it). We had explored doing some photo books for holiday gifts but they ended up being too pricey. Next year, I think we’ll do a bunch.

I got myself down to the Chestnut Hill Apple store last Saturday before the blizzard hit and picked up a copy of iLife 5.0. The store was already sold out of Mac minis (and hadn’t gotten any iPod shuffles) by the time I arrived around 11 a.m. Thankfully, there were plenty of copies of iLife and iWork along with a big crowd looking at everything in the store.

Here’s my early take after playing with it for a few days. Installing was a breeze and iPhoto 5.0 has quite a few changes in addition to the print options I’ve already mentioned. First the bad news, performance for a host of operation including starting up the program, opening and closing a picture in “edit” mode and generally moving about between different albums is much slower than the previous version.

(updated 2/03) The rest of the changes are mostly for the good, although still leaving room for improvement. (The minor 5.01 update seemed aimed at fixing some show-stopper bugs, like whole photo libraries being wrecked upon “update,” that I thankfully didn’t suffer). Start with importing. Instead of showing a tiny thumbnail, you get full size pictures and the process seems snappier. You can import pictures in the RAW format if your camera supports that option. The import screen also now offers a place to name the virtual “roll” and add a description (by the way, when will Apple’s photo printing service offer the super cool Shutterfly deal of allowing you to write an 80-character description that appears on the back of prints?). One big addition — movies are now imported instead of stacking up on the memory card inside the camera waiting to be manually offloaded. With my Canon Powershot S500, which allows me to shoot lengthy video clips with sound, this is a great convenience. Movies appear in the library just like photos but when you double-click they open in a separate Quicktime window ready for playing.

In terms of organization, the program finally allows you to create folders in your list of albums. All I can say, FINALLY! Now I don’t have to scroll down forever just to find the trash can or the location of a newly created album. On the downside, slide shows and books are less ephemeral and create their own little icons in the album list whenever you create one. In a way this is good, if you are making a lot of slide shows or books that you want to be able to refer back to, but that’s never how I used those features.

(Added 1/27) Actually, as an astute MacSlash reader points out, there is a new unlabeled “play” button on the very bottom, left side of the main screen that brings you directly to the old & simple slide show control panel. Phew…Just remember to unclick the annoying “automatic Ken Burns effect” and then hit “save settings.”

(Updated 1/27) So that leaves me to explain that clicking on “Slide Show” now takes you to a much more complex area for making slide shows that you want to save or burn to a DVD or otherwise return to later. Any slide show you make here appears as an icon in the list of albums. You can set individual duration times and transition effects for each slide. You can also apply the aforementioned Ken Burns effect that sweeps the point of view across the picture a la the documentaries of KB. Finding the traditional slide show control requires a couple of clicks and it’s not obvious where it is.

I’m not psyched about the new complexity but the intended effect, I think, is to make it easier to create flashy slide shows (with settings individualized for each slide) that you can transfer to DVD, but it’s way overkill for the “I just wanna see all the pictures we just took” slide shows that we do 95% of the time.

A cool new feature is a scrollable list of thumb nail images that appears at the top of the program when you are making a slideshow, book or are in edit mode. This allows you to move around or drag and drop photos to reorganize more easily than the old program allowed. Sweet.

Speaking of editing, as Jobs noted, editing options are also increased up the wazoo. In an Adobe PhotoShop-like palette, you can now adjust saturation, temperature, tint, sharpness, straightness and exposure. You also get control over one of those histogram displays that I don’t really get (more research needed!). As always, “undo” is a great help as is the real-time view of the effects produced by playing with all the sliders in the adjustment palette.

Red eye reduction has undergone a change for the worse. In the old version, you drew a box around an eye and hit the red-eye button and the problem was usually solved. Now you hit the red-eye button and then get a target cross-hairs cursor and you have to click in the center of each eye. The results aren’t as good as under the old system, sadly.

As I mentioned at the top book design has been overhauled with many new options, including little wallet books for only $4 and the drag and drop capable thumbnail view shown above each book. Worth the price of admission alone! I suspect that some of my complaints will addressed in future updates.