iLife '04: iPhoto 4.0 Review
Because Scrapbooks Suck
23 January 2004 Justin Williams Skip to comments
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Justin Williams puts Apple's iPhoto 4, part of the iLife '04 package through a rigorous stress test to see if it can stand up to its claims.
One of the applications in the iLife '04 Suite that has been under much fire is iPhoto. With the '04 release of the suite, Apple made the decision to begin charging for the update to its photo management application. Previous updates were available for free via Software Update. No matter your opinion on whether the upgrade fee is justified or not, iPhoto 4.0 offers several new features that any digital photo enthusiast will enjoy using.
This article will give an overview of the new features in iPhoto 4 and how to use them. This article is for anyone that has a Mac running Jaguar or Panther with iPhoto 4 installed. You should probably have a digital camera and an iPhoto library already setup or feel free to start from scratch.
Improved Features
iPhoto 4 improves on several features over iPhoto 2. With the introduction of iLife '04 Apple decidely skipped over the iPhoto 3.x family and notched it up to version 4.0 straight from version 2.0. The biggest improvement by far is the speed.
With previous versions of iPhoto a large iPhoto library left you destined for sluggish performance, even if you divided your libraries into sub-libraries with a third-party add on such as iPhoto Library Manager.
iPhoto 4 now boasts zero waiting for a photo library with no more than 25,000 photos. I personally do not know anyone with 25,000 photos, so I cannot test this for myself. I can however say that on a 12" G3/500 iBook 1,000 photos resize a lot snappier than they did in previous versions. The difference is very noticeable.
Slideshows have been improved. No longer do you have to listen to the same song over and over when you are going through your slideshow. You can now set a playlist from iTunes to play behind your slideshows. To select your playlist of choice, perform the following steps:
- Make sure you have selected the "Organize" tab.
- Click Slideshow.
- The Slideshow panel will popup.
- Selet the Music Tab. Make sure you have "Play Music During Slideshow" checked and then select your playlist. Click OK.
You can also set more transitions besides the classic dissolve. Now included are the cube (from Keynote and Fast User Switching fame), Mosaic Flip and Wipe. These are all accessed under the Settings tab in the Slideshow panel.
Once you run a slideshow, you can have on-screen controls. These controls allow you to navigate through the slideshow, rotate photos, set a rating and delete photos you do not like. You can enable or disable this feature under the slideshow panel. Simply check "Enable Slideshow Controls."
New Features
iPhoto 4 has borrowed several features from iTunes to further put it ahead of anything that Windows has to offer. The new iPhoto 4.0 features are nothing earth shattering, but you will no doubt find them useful in some way or another.
Like in iTunes you can better organize and mange your iPhoto library by rating your favorite or least favorite. At first the process is not as intuitive as one would think. To enable ratings, select View -> My Rating. My first thought was to be able to set the ratings from below the image a la iTunes. This was not possible, so I had to either use keyboard shortcuts or select each image and select Photos -> My Rating -> Rating. The keyboard shortcuts are pretty simple and save a lot of time. I went through and rated all 1,100 of my digital photos in a little under an hour.
- 1 Star: Command+1 (Apple Key +1)
- 2 Stars: Command+2
- 3 Stars: Command+3
- 4 Stars: Command+4
- 5 Stars: Command+5
Now, with all of those ratings set wouldn't it be nice if we could tell iPhoto to create a photo album with my top rated photos? Well now we can. Smart Albums is another feature borrowed from iTunes. You can create a smart album based on ratings, date range, film roll, titles or album names. To create a "smart album" just select File -> New Smart Album. The setup is similar to a smart playlist in iTunes. The only album I have created so far is titled Top Rated and displays only my four and five star photos. Here's how I to do it:
- Select "New Smart Album."
- Name your smart album.
- Under Match the Following Condition, set the first condition to read "My Rating is 4 Stars" and the second to "My Rating is 5 Stars." Also, be sure to set the all or any listbox to any. Otherwise, you won't have any images in your album.
If you have a home network with several Macs running iPhoto, the new Rendezvous sharing feature will be of use to you.
Let's say that you and your family go on a trip and each person takes their own digital camera. When you get back, everyone puts their photos on their respective Macs and imports the photo into their iPhoto libraries.
Before, no one could see the other person's photos without a lot of work. With Rendezvous Technology now built into iPhoto, seeing another person's Digital Photo library is just a few mouse clicks away. To enable sharing, perform the following steps:
- Open the iPhoto Preferences Panel (iPhoto -> Preferences)
- Select the Sharing Icon.
- Check the "Share My Photos" checkbox.
- Make sure "Look For Shared Photos" is checked as well. This lets you look through the network for shared libraries.
- Set a name for your shared Libraries and set a password if you so desire.
As you can see, iPhoto 4 offers several improvements and new features that makes the best user-centric photo management for the Mac light years ahead of anything on the Windows side. Adobe Photoshop Album wishes it had half the features that iPhoto had, and when you figure that iPhoto only costs ~$10 ($50 divided by 5 iLife applications), it is a real bargain.
If there is anything else you would like to know about iPhoto or any other of the iLife apps, submit a reader request or leave a comment and MacZealots will do our best to try and honor your requests...
Justin Williams is founder and chief author for MacZealots. He switched to the Mac almost five years ago hasn't looked back since. When not blogging or coding, you can find him watching copious amounts of TV. Justin can be reached at
Reader Comments (8)
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#1) On January 23, 2004 11:34 AM
Do you have 1 gig RAM? On my b/w g3 350 mhz, it’s useless. The speed is lower than with my old Iphoto 2. And i have only 1500 photos. I can recommend Iview 2.0.2 instead.
#2) On January 23, 2004 11:45 AM
1100 Photos were tested on a G3 500MHz iBook w/ 640mb of ram and a Dual 2Ghz G5 with 512mb of ram. yes, it is pathetic that my iBook has more ram than the G5 :-p
#3) On January 23, 2004 5:02 PM
I agree that iPhoto 4 is a tremendous upgrade. I estimate performance improvement of 200% on my flat panel imac with 768MB ram.
#4) On January 23, 2004 6:39 PM
G4/867 DP, 1GB Ram, 10.3.2
iPhoto 4 has solved the biggest hangup of all - SPEED. I have 4942 photos (3000 more import) and it is amazingly fast in every way. Others have said 200% faster, I would say even 400-1000% faster, b/c there are no more spinning beach balls.
There are a few new useful features like viewing multiple last rolls (if view/film rolls is checked), and the smart libraries are neat.
The best feature they added is “Batch Change”, under the Photo menu. This makes a world of difference for renaming photos (it can automatically append a number), changing the date and time, adding comments to a group of photos at the same time!!! Plus it’s easy to use.
Two giant glarring issues still exist:
-The keywords feature stinks. The interface is has not changed, it’s to time consuming to add/modify new keywords, and the list is not sortable. All of this makes keywords almost unuseable. It’s easier to rename items and give them comments than to apply keywords. It’s too bad, keywords plus smartlist would make a great team.
The album structure is still “flat”. Why can’t we put the albums into folder for better organization? I now have a leading title to each group of photos. For example I have “Outdoors” in front of 12 albums, and “Chistmas-” in front of 10 albums. Not only does that take away from readable space, but I have to scroll the list of 85 albums to find things. I didn’t have those leading titles I would never find anything by album.
At first I was soooo dissapointed with iPhoto 4, but with the improved speed and batch change feature it’s a worthy upgrade.
-Johnster
#5) On January 26, 2004 10:19 PM
Question: My iMac screen saver generates a nice slide show with Ken Burns effect and overlap transition. Is there a way on previous iLife or iLife 4 to create a similar slideshow where
1) transition can be assigned to groups of slides (instead of just 2 adjoining slides)
2) Ken Burns effect given to all slides (better yet, slides can be assigned zoom in and others zoom out)
3) music from play list
and
4) slideshow sent to iMovie/iDVD?
Right now, I make the slide show in iMovie and set up each transition and each Ken Burns effect slide by slide by slide.
If iLIfe 4 can help me easily create slide show described above, the time savings would be well worth the price.
thanks for your help.
#6) On October 21, 2004 3:17 PM
iPhoto begins playing a slide show then stops and goes to main screen again. is there a limit to number or size of photos in an album to slide show?….on a powerbook.
thx
#7) On December 14, 2004 12:01 AM
Great article, but how do you select more than one song in the slide show in Iphoto?
can anyone email me with an answer
thanks
#8) On May 2, 2005 2:13 PM
I’m new to iPhoto, and the first thing I notice is that the keyboard shortcuts are inadequate for the job - there’s no way to go into Edit mode for a close-up view without double-clicking, which slows down users considerably. This is probably one of the highest-use actions in iPhoto yet there’s no keyboard shortcut - big omission. Also no keyboard way of selecting multiple photos or moving photos around in an album. Additionally some small oversights make the existing keyboard shortcuts useless - for instance, if multiple photos are selected (slowly, using the mouse), then Cmd-Shift-B is used to give them all the same title, Cmd-Shift-B takes the user into an (unnamed) dialog box, but then the tab key and arrow keys don’t move the cursor into the text field to enter the name - pointlessly, they only hop the control between the OK and Cancel buttons. These problems make an application that could be super-quick and powerful to use slow and painful. Does anyone know a way around them?