2007.10.22
iPhoto 08 Gripes
Old Family PoloroidI got iPhoto 08 a few weeks ago along with the rest of the iLife package. I was initially not impressed with the automatic splitting of my photo library into “events” because my collection is haphazard, non-contiguous and completely out of order by dates. It took a lot of wrangling to get its default breakdown into some semblance of order. I have to say I still don’t like the whole thing, though at least going forward it will be easier.
My main gripe now, though, is with the Smart Albums. Smart Albums are essentially live searches of your photos based on certain criteria. I use them primarily to synch specific photos to my iPod and iPhone since I don’t want to copy the entire library over. This past weekend I scanned some really old photos of my family and thought it would be great to have a Smart Album of just my highest rated pictures of my family.
All of my pictures are tagged with keywords with people’s names so you would think I could create a Smart Album with the criteria
Rating is greater than three stars AND
Keyword is Mom OR Dad OR Chris OR Heather OR (etc)
This is not the case, though. The Smart Album function cannot handle simple Boolean strings. I have the options of either matching all or any options. This limits me to all AND or all OR.
To me this seems rather retarded. How has Apple missed such a simple and potentially useful tool? Or do they have it and I’m just missing something? Hopefully they include this in future updates because it seems, to me anyways, that it shouldn’t be too difficult to implement.
Categorized: apple grrr photos
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4 Responses to “iPhoto 08 Gripes”
- Jason Clark says (October 23rd, 2007 at 10:28:35 )
I haven’t picked up ‘08 yet, but that sounds similar to an issue I have had with iTunes Smart playlists. Assuming the Smart Album builder allows you to specify that a photo belong to another album, you can get what you want with an extra album:
1. Create a “People” album, where keyword is Mom OR Dad OR Chris OR Heather (etc.)
2. Create a “3* People” album, where in-album ‘People’ AND rating > 3 stars. This is the album you sync.
As I said, I haven’t tested, but I know iTunes allows you to build a smart playlist that references other playlists. Hopefully you can do the same with albums in iPhoto.
- douglas says (October 23rd, 2007 at 18:15:45 )
That’s a brilliant idea that I hadn’t thought of trying. Unfortunately it won’t let you select Smart Albums as a reference point. It will let you select static albums, however, so I guess I could do the tedious steps necessary to create static albums…
I did discover that you can create a folder and put your Smart Albums in them. Then when you choose the folder in iPhoto you get all the pictures from the individual Smart Albums it contains. Again, though, you can’t synch folders.
So frustrating!
- Jason Clark says (October 24th, 2007 at 05:49:38 )
Maybe this is obvious and you checked, but can you create a smart album based on a Folder? Stash smart album #1 in a folder, base smart album #2 on the folder, etc.
- douglas says (October 24th, 2007 at 14:32:03 )
I did try that, too. Alas.
Hey, Apple! Get with the program!
