In the list of new features in iPhoto ’11, “fun” is more prominent than “functional.” During the keynote, special emphasis was given to the new slideshows in iPhoto ’11, which do not disappoint. They are especially rewarding if you have put forth the effort to tag faces and places. With just a few clicks I was watching a slideshow of a trip, and the ease of use combined with the fun imparted by the theme made the experience a genuine delight.
Faces and Places both received a usability upgrade in iPhoto ’11 as well. Their function remains the same, but the interface seems much more accessible now. For example, the new Info column exposes an easy was to tag people in your photographs and add a location. While not a glamourous update, it is a welcome one.
Another prominent new feature is the fullscreen mode. When using iPhoto ’11 in fullscreen, I get the distinct impression that I am looking at a mockup of an iPad app. In fact, the fullscreen mode of every new iLife application seems tailor-made to be used with OSX Lion’s Mission Control, where screens can be swept from side to side. It’s nice, but it all feels a bit too inspired by iOS. During this time where much ado has been made about multitasking in iOS, the best multitasking computer continues to be the traditional desktop, where multiple windows can be open at once and all easily managed. The new iLife suite (and, by extension, Lion) sadly breaks this great feature by introducing a uni-tasking environment, where just one app is on the screen at any given time. Sound familiar?
BUGS
iPhoto ’11 was not billed as a complete rewrite of iPhoto, but it feels like it has some very 1.0 bugs. The beach ball has made a very unwelcome return, and the celebrated fullscreen mode caused my iMac to crash so hard it required a hard reboot. After it came back up iPhoto entered fullscreen without a problem, but I was left with serious doubts about its reliability. Some of the keyboard binding have been neglected as well. The escape key usually brings you back one level, for example, from inside an event back out the the main window. In iPhoto ’11 this seems to be missing.
iPhoto ’11 is also sluggish. Whenever I add a location to a group of pictures, the application becomes slow to respond or totally unresponsive, throws up a beach ball, and I have to wait up to 30 seconds until it has finished. Similarly, my co-author Philipp saw multi-second delays when confirming names in Faces. Adding metadata to an image should be an instant operation, and in previous versions of iPhoto, this has never been a problem.
ROUNDUP
In all, I believe these small bugs and performance issues can be easily fixed with a quick software update. If you are the kind of person who is really excited to play with the new slideshows and themes, these bugs shouldn’t stop you from buying iLife ’11. If it’s stability you are after, you might want to wait to upgrade until Apple has released a fix that addresses the these glitches and performance issues.
About Steve
I too have been seeing hideous (2-3 minutes plus) beach balls, corrupted video and the need to power off my Mac to get it to respond. I was able to do a little face tagging, but I found that whenever I hit the space bar to zoom a photo up to full size (tried from both an Event view, and a Face view), that’s when the craziness kicked in.
I’m a *huge* Apple fanboi, but I’ve *NEVER* seen an initial release from Apple *SO* unstable.
My collection is about 35,000 photos (~100GB), which live on a 500GB USB 2.0 external drive connected directly to my white 24″ iMac 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo with 2.5GB memory.
I am disappointed that the Get Info box in iPhoto ’11 no longer displays all of the JPEG data like iPhoto ’09. Opening the photo with Photoshop or Photoshop Elements is a work around, but this is very disappointing.
I agree. do those programmers don’t get frustrated about this release? looks like time pressure to me.
better good and late, then to0 quick and bad. Apple is going the windows way here….That’s exactly why I jumped ship. to many disappointments lately…they’d better re-grip. If simple things like ESC don’t work anymore, I can only assume this is sloppiness due to time-stress. and that’s bad for business.
And the full screen? Iphoto 09 was better in edit mode!
WHO THE FRAK (Caprica speaking here:-) is REVIEWING this alpha-release??
If you can’t do it properly, let it be. Nice try, but no go.
after crash #xxx on a fresh IMAC 27 I’m upgrading now to version 9.01 … hopefully those over-hours are worth it for the programmers!
I feel for you guys, you can’t help it. It’s the head of the fish that is starting to rot first:_-)
Proper full screen view is not a feature. It is a basic aesthetic that has been around since drawings were done on cave walls. Every image ever created should have the freedom to stand on its own without any interference and be judged or appreciated in that way. The frame of your laptop or computer will suffice to hold the image in and nothing else is required (or necessary) Why does Apple have this notion that their groovy new “full screen viewer window” complete with data, tool bars, buttons is not going to deplete an image by distracting the viewer? It is a false notion and the best thing Apple could do is to put back the “proper” full screen view of an image. They have stolen something from users that is essential and should have been “grandfathered” into iphoto. Removing it is akin to not allowing someone to breathe.
Based on the comments on Ilife11′s Iphoto11, I am not going to buy it. Sounds like a headache to me.
If you use MobileMe Galleries, iPhoto ’11 is a bag of hurt.