Today I threw out 1576 pictures (6,6Gb worth) of iPhoto 2. That means I only have 3166 (or 13,3 Gb) of them left on my computer. I bought iPhoto 5 being reasonably happy with iPhoto 2 but being promised better performance. Now that didn't turn out well. (yes, it was faster, but it should handle the photo collection of an average DSLR amateur) iPhoto is the program that crashes most frequently on my computer. Only reason for going with iPhoto was that f-spot wasn't stable on OS X, and last I checked about a month ago it still wasn't. I'm recompiling now, though, hoping that OS X stability comes around soon. (It'd be awesome having it included with fink) This guy won't be upgrading to iPhoto 6 anytime soon. Apple hasn't taken a single bug report regarding iPhoto 5 seriously. No stability patch has been released. Bad enough it being dreadfully slow. Sorry Apple, you had my money, leave photography for the rest and build those wonderful computers you're so good at.

I've been using iPhoto lately, and I've been using it a lot.

First to the RAW issue. Does Apple make use of RAW? Yes and no. When at first you load the RAW, the changes you make will use the RAW file as source and apply them, not wasting your precious data. However, it will save the changed file as a JPEG. Thus, next time you make a change, iPhoto will NOT use your RAW file, apply the changes you did before and the ones you have made now and save that as a file, but it will use your intermediate JPEG file, thus wasting more information than necessary. This is most apparent when you use external programs. Try dragging your fresh file to an application, and it will be served a RAW file. Make some changes in iPhoto, and it will be served a JPEG. Can this be solved? Yes, it's quite easy for Apple to save a trail of what modifications have been done to the image as metadata to the image and apply these when making changes later. It will take a bit longer to save the file, but that will defintely be worth it.

Second, not being able to select a whitepoint is a hassle. For the pictures you're not passionate about, this is not a problem, but to the ones you want to give your best attention, iPhoto will not be what you're using. Selecting a whitepoint is so quickly done in other programs

But iPhoto 5 is WAY faster than iPhoto 2. I've been hitting it with my 30mb/photo negative scans (the Nikon Super coolscan 4000ED is doing a great job backing up my fathers negatives), rotating and cropping away. I've been touring Denmark with this years Very Big Band project, taking 4gb worth of photos with my Canon EOS 20D, organizing the lot and putting it together with iDVD. (The iPhoto/iDVD combination does not work super as there is no other way than manual to change the sort order of the iPhoto pictures when importing them to in iDVD. And once it's cached a iPhoto folder, resorting the folder in iPhoto won't help either) Sorting, rotating, simple editing and organizing the photos and burning them to a DVD (iPhoto format) is easy, if you don't mind waiting 5 seconds now, 10 seconds after the next edit and 5 seconds to create a folder.

Bugs? Yes sir, the progress window will keep open forever when I've been editing files, and the program will often go into what looks like an endless while when it's not used, leaving "force quit" as the only option. Doing too many things at once seems to confuse the editor and make it do only a few of the changes that were asked for.

So is it worth the upgrade? For me I'd say a definitive yes. I'm more organized with my photos as iPhoto 5 can handle more pictures quicker than iPhoto 2 could. Is there room for improvement? Yes, very much. Hope Apple will release upgrades beyond the 5.01 upgrade, which I believe they did not for iPhoto 4.

The TNT delivery guy was here and delivered my iLife '05 pack which I bought solely because of iPhoto. (Apple refused to give me a student discount for the software, even though I ordered via the net. I've heared people don't get student discounts in Apple's stores.) I use my Canon Ixus, Canon EOS 20D, HP Scanner and Nikon negativescanner much, so being very annoyed about the sluggish performance of iPhoto 2 but loving its way of interacting with my blog and organising pictures, and hearing good thing about performance on iPhoto 4 and that iPhoto 5 would be better performance wise, I decided to upgrade after they threw in RAW handling (which seems to be a total fake).

First impression: the DVD was filthy. I opened the box, took it out of its envelope, and had to clean it before putting it in my drive. Wow, I've never had that happen to me with new software before. Was the packaging done by hand or something? Anyways. iLife takes a whopping 4.7 GB, or 5% of my harddrive. The installation took 45 minutes, the converting of my iPhoto 2 library of 800 photos took 2 hours! (I run a 1Ghz iMac with 1GB ram)

Scrolling is indeed much faster. Not as fast as f-spot, but still fast. Opening a 8 megapixel picture takes 3 seconds, opening a 20 megapixel picture takes 6 seconds. Saving a slightly cropped 20 megapixel picture took 37 seconds! Saving a slightly cropped 8 megapixel image took 8 seconds. Each edit must be saved before proceeding to the next picture, no option to make changes on previews and then batch them together in one go. Meaning I won't be using iPhoto to edit my 20 megapixel photos that my filmscanner makes.

RAW: (what we've all been waiting for) No camera color profiles to load, no spot white balance to set. Just lots and lots of impresise sliders so you can see what it looks like and choose a setting based on that. In other word, it's no replacement for ufraw (or whatever RAW converting application you use). Even Canon's bundeled software handles development from RAW images nicer, and I really don't like that bundled software. So even though I have iPhoto, I still want to keep working on RAW support for f-spot, and you might want to stick with your favourite RAW processing software.

Good thing: getting to continue my work while it does the importing. Bad thing: doing so led to my first iPhoto 5 crash, after under an hour of usage. Wee. I hope we'll see Apple updating this one quickly. Bug report sent.

Preferences: why can I not choose Thunderbird as my email program?

So, based on my first impressions, this is my wishlist for Apple to improve iPhoto '05:

• REAL RAW support
• Batch handling for editing
• No crashing
• Faster image handling

Is it just me, or is iPhoto getting seriously old. First off all, it doesn't support RAW yet, so the CR2 files from my Canon EOS 20D are easily getting seriously disorganized. Seconldy, speed... sorry Apple, I've seen iPhoto 4 with 7000 1 mb pictures with the odd 40mb picture in it, it's just not up to par on your iMac 1Ghz/1GB which should be more than good enough to handle this. How hard is it to cache those thumbnails? Waiting minutes every time you move the scrollbar just doesn't work. So I've stuck with iPhoto 2 which is equally slow. Features of iPhoto 4 I'd like of course, and I'm so looking forward to hearing news of what Apple has in plan for the next revision (will that be iPhoto 6, 8 or 16, btw? ) as iPhoto 2 doesn't work well for more than a gb of photos at a time or so.