Apple's New iPhoto Handles Thousands of Digital Pictures (online at http://ptech.wsj.com/ptech.html)
APPLE COMPUTER is trying to position its Macintosh personal computer as a "digital hub." The message is that using a Mac will make it easier to enhance your use of a digital camera, camcorder, portable digital music player, or CD or DVD player.
Some of this is just plain marketing, a skill at which Apple has few peers. Competing PCs, using the Windows operating system, are also perfectly capable of connecting with cameras and music players, and handling photos, videos and songs. But even when you clear away the hype, Apple has a point.
Every Mac comes with a suite of free, elegant digital media programs, which are in most cases simpler and more capable than their Windows counterparts. There's iMovie, the easiest and best video editor I've seen. There's iTunes, a very nice MP3 music jukebox that can also burn audio CDs. There's iDVD, the best and simplest program I've tested for creating home-made DVDs. And now, Apple has rounded out the quartet with iPhoto, a program for organizing, managing and sharing digital photos.
I'VE BEEN testing iPhoto in recent days on Apple's radical new flat-panel iMac computer. The software is free and runs on all current and recent Macs. But it only works with the most recent version of Apple's new operating system, OS X.
There are scads of other consumer photo programs, mostly for Windows. But iPhoto is different. Most other photo software concentrates on helping you to edit your photos and then turn them into "projects," like calendars and greeting cards. IPhoto concentrates on organizing your photos and then sharing them with others. There are some limited editing tools, but the emphasis is on managing and sharing a large collection of digital photos, not tweaking each one to perfection.
It's like a digital replacement for that shoebox where you keep years of prints from the drugstore. When you plug a digital camera into your Mac, iPhoto automatically launches, ready to import the pictures. It can also import pictures from your hard disk or from a CD.
With iPhoto, you can handle thousands of pictures, stretching over years. And you can quickly and easily turn them into prints, or into a free, customized Web page, or -- and this is the coolest part -- into a professionally bound book, with heavy glossy pages between linen covers.
I've tried other programs, on Windows, that also try to organize your photos. But they are all much more complicated than iPhoto.
With iPhoto, all your pictures are displayed as thumbnails in a single large window, organized by the date you imported them, either from a digital camera or a hard disk. You can see hundreds of thumbnails at once, or, using a slider, make them larger so that only a few, or even a single one, can be seen.
MOST PHOTO programs identify your pictures by the complex and nonsensical file names the camera and computer use. But iPhoto allows you to "tag" each photo with a title and/or comment of your own creation. You can also tag each picture with one or more of 15 keywords you create yourself. So all your vacation pictures can be tagged with the keyword "vacation," and pictures of little Louie can be tagged "Little Louie." You can quickly bring up all pictures of Louie, or only those of Louie on vacation.
You can also rotate and crop your pictures, fix red eye and turn a color photo to black and white. And iPhoto can automatically link to other, more capable programs for editing your photos, such as Adobe Photoshop.
With a couple of clicks, you can create a virtual album of any subset of your collection and name it anything you like. You can then use that album as the basis for a beautiful slideshow, set to music. You can order Kodak prints of the pictures, over the Internet, right from within iPhoto. In afew minutes, you can also build a free Web home page out of them that can be viewed on any computer.
But the best way to share the photos is in a bound book. For $29, you get a 10-page book, with each extra page costing $3. There are six different canned layouts to choose from, and you can choose which photo goes on the cover and which ones go on each inner page. Photos can be grouped in twos, threes or fours, and you can write your own commentary.
I created a book of a trip my wife and I took to the Rhode Island shore this summer, and it came out beautifully in a couple of days. People who saw it were amazed. Nearly identical books can be ordered, without iPhoto or a Mac, from a Web site called myPublisher (www.mypublisher.com). But the process of designing and ordering the books is much clumsier and slower than it is in iPhoto.
So iPhoto is a winner. But it does have some drawbacks. The most annoying is that you can only search by keyword, not by title or comment. The editing function lacks the ability to fix a picture's brightness, contrast and hue, which are very common needs. And, in the section where you create your printed book, putting the photos in the right order is harder than it needs to be.
Still, if digital photos are your passion, iPhoto is a strong argument for getting a Mac.
