Apple broke iPhoto 2011

When iPhoto 2009 came out, I wrote this review and despite some shortcomings, I was pretty happy and trusted it with some 50,000 photos. Now I have been working with iPhoto 2011 on MacOS Lion for a few months, and I have to say Apple broke it in so many ways that I must now recommend to not upgrade to iPhoto 2011. (Or Lion - same problem, see below.) You cannot later downgrade because iPhoto 2011 rewrites the database. If you are serious about photo management, you'll have to invest in Apple Aperture.

Executive summary: Apple has always had a penchant for favoring form over function, but here form puts a bullet through function's head.

Here's a quick list of the flaws in iPhoto 2011. I'll explain some of these in more detail in the following sections.

• Everything has become harder and slower to use. There are fewer keyboard shortcuts, and those that exist are rarely documented. The mouse has become far more important. For example, you can't switch from photo view back to album view with ESC, you must navigate to a little button near the top left corner.

• The GUI has become very sparse; many functions and information appear only on request. The new full-screen is almost useless because of this because you look at lots of photos but there is very little you can do.

• Full-screen mode cannot display the hierarchical album list. Albums go into an unsorted grid of photo stacks that make it basically impossible to find anything if you have more than a dozen albums. That alone kills full-screen mode.

• I find it annoying that the album list no longer shows photo counts. It's much more difficult to check whether everything was imported. Also, there is no longer a web upload progress bar when syncing.

• Duplicate recognition is now broken. You can no longer import a lot of photos and rely on iPhoto to skip the duplicates. It will recognize some but not others.

• Place entry is still broken. It doesn't know Marseille, France's second-largest city, but offers a choice between Marseilles, Marseilles, and Marseilles. It won't find Géménos if you type gemenos, it must be properly capitalized and and all vowels must be accented.

• Straightening photos is still broken. You get a little slider that is hyper-sensitive, rather than easy handles on the photo.

• Sometimes iPhoto 2011 gets into a mode where it doesn't show keywords in the info panel anymore. I haven't been able to find the iPhoto 2009 mode of showing the keywords beneath each photo either. At least that's only a display bug, the photos retain the keywords.

• As Apple will discontinue Mobile Me galleries, syncing with other services has become very important. I chose Flickr. But iPhoto's new sharing features are a total mess.

Like many Apple products recently, the newer version is worse than the previous version. Usability and functionality is sacrificed for superficial polish. It seems like iPhoto 2011 was designed for a tablet where screen space is scarce, and people expect to play a little but do no serious work, and work with very little data. If you can, stick with iPhoto 2009!

A desktop is a phone?

A common theme I have found is Apple taking ideas from their mobile iOS for iPhones and iPads, and putting them in their desktop OS. Microsoft's mobile market share got obliterated because Microsoft thought that a mobile telephone is really just a miniaturized desktop. Apple has now decided that a desktop is just an oversized telephone. And it does not work.

Small phone and tablet displays work best with big icons that can be touched with fat fingers, because that's the only available input method. Desktop screen have input methods with much finer control, namely mice and trackpads and work better with texts, allowing greater information density and less scrolling and searching. Desktop displays are also far larger and allow displaying multiple windows and more information without becoming crowded or confusing.

Here are some examples from iPhoto 2011. I have a 27" iMac with a screen resolution of 2560x1440. It's big. But even the smallest Macbook is defined by a screen size and resolution far greater than a phone. For example, why did Apple drop photo counts from album lists? There's plenty of space. You do get the count when selecting an album, on the right side of a very wide title bar - but it disappears when you select a photo! Apple's small-screen iPhone mindset didn't even let them write "123 photos, 1 selected" in the top bar even though there is half a meter of space there.

Apple discontinued Mobile Me Galleries

It gets worse. Apple will discontinue their photo gallery service soon so you need to use something like Flickr. They provided a sync function for this, just like in iPhoto 2009, good. But the new iPhone mindset makes it hard to use. If you choose Share Flickr, you get this popup:

It's tiny on my screen and it can't be resized. It shows a grand total of six Flickr albums to export to, out of well over a hundred. And it jumps back to the top every time it comes up. And it's totally unsorted! And the big font truncates even moderately long album names. So I must slowly scroll this tiny window, reading all the titles until I found the one I need. Note the size of the scroll bar handle.

This is not just broken in every possible way, it demonstrates that it's intentionally broken to conform to a model that does not work. Apple was once famous for thoughtful human-centered design. No longer. Even Microsoft thinks clearer than this now because they have learned their lesson.

iPhoto does not sync to Flickr. It uploads. If you sync the same album again, photos uploaded previously are duplicated. If an upload fails, which happens frequently, you must find out which photos didn't make it and select and re-uploiad just those. This makes iPhoto's album publishing function nearly worthless. Someone at Apple was clearly asleep at the wheel.

No longer reliable

Let's stay with sharing with Flickr a little longer. You go through the menus, uploading a number of albums, and everything looks fine; the little spinner icon shows that iPhoto understood what you asked it to do. Except, when it's done, some of the albums aren't on Flickr. It took the time but didn't do anything. Next time iPhoto is started - or maybe the time after next, it's not even reliably unreliable - you get a long sequence of rolldown messages like this that must all be clicked away. Keep pencil and paper handy because you'll need to write down the album names:

Why has it been removed? Who removed it? What went wrong? What do I need to do so it won't happen again? Sorry but these aren't questions that iPhoto is prepared to answer. I hope you did write down those names because now you need to go and find those albums and share them again. You may have to do this several times, one of mine "caught" on the fourth attempt.

Ok, I am getting the hang of how Apple writes software these days, so I painstakingly went through all my shared albums in iPhoto and wrote down the photo counts. Then I went to Flickr, which makes no attempt to hide the photo counts like iPhoto does, and compared. And guess what? Over a quarter didn't match. Most of the counts were off by a few percent, but eight of them lost between 20 and 230 photos. Obviously iPhoto didn't report this, and didn't resync later. If some Windows 95 shareware written by a 14-year old did this, I'd shrug, but I am not going to excuse Apple. Losing data without warning is not acceptable.

When exporting photos to Flickr, the photo order is no longer correct, apparently the photo dates are lost. Fortunately I usually prefix my photo names with a sequential number, so I can use Flickr's "sort alphabetically" function to clean up. But why is this necessary? iPhoto gives an overall impression of carelessness, and broken functionality and usability design, under a beautiful visual veneer.

MacOS X is a single-tasking operating system, which means it often becomes unresponsive for a short while, usually not more than a few minutes, when the kernel is busy with networking or a Time Machine backup or something. (This is so twentieth century, but this article is about iPhoto problems, not MacOS problems.) But sometimes iPhoto 2011 freezes for good and must be killed.

A few times it just crashed all by itself after freezing for a while. Fortunately, iPhoto doesn't seem to lose much when it blows up, all changes get written to disk quickly enough.

Full-screen mode

Apple is proud of this one. Many programs in MacOS Lion have a new full-screen mode, and iPhoto 2011 is in this select group. Full-screen mode is great for telephones and small pads because no pixels are wasted for title bars or window frames. MacOS Lion even suppresses scroll bars by default! But this makes no sense for desktops where pixels are not scarce.

iPhoto 2011 goes one step further and turns this useless feature into a broken feature. Menus and buttons move all over the place to make more room for the picture. For a few centimeters saved it makes the program very difficult to use, almost like an additional program to learn. And it was designed for a phone where you have a few hundred photos, not a desktop with many thousands.

Here's the problem: you probably have a nice hierarchical list of albums, perhaps using toplevel folders for annual collections or locations so you can find things quickly. I have 632 albums and sort them by year and processing stage. In full-screen mode, this hierarchical list becomes an unstructured grid. Note the scrollbar on the right edge, and consider that this view is 60cm (two feet) wide:

There are so many things wrong with that that I don't know where to begin. The list is unsorted, it takes forever to find anything. Nearly all album names are truncated because they use a huge font. It takes a lot of thumbnail lookups so even on my quadcore i7 iMac with 8 gigs of RAM it takes forever to scroll. In fact the album thumbnail pictures are just GUI sugar, the essential information is in the (truncated) names. Never has less information been randomly scattered over more space.

Everyone who thought this would be a good idea, and who designed this, and who coded it, and who let it pass quality control, should be summarily demoted to landscape gardening without pay. This is a truly amazing example of disregard for even minimal usability. Wasn't Apple supposed to be the hero of usability? No wait, that was last century...

Oh, by the way, normally MacOS allows keyboard shortcuts for screens. But this doesn't work for fullscreen applications, they must always be located and clicked in the dock.

Working with iPhoto

When working with iPhoto, I just find functions to be arranged in confusing ways. Some functions are in the Info side bar, others in the Edit side bar. The Edit side bar is further subdivided into three modes, one of which is useless and for toys like Sepia coloring.

If you are like me, many of your photos won't have their horizon straight when it's supposed to. I hate that, but even with a DSLR viewfinder I often get it wrong. iPhoto has a Straighten function, but instead of aligning the photo itself, you get a tiny little slider where a single-pixel move becomes a fairly major rotation:

Most of the time you just want a few degrees, often a fraction of a degree. Just to kick you in the back of the head, iPhoto adds a little extra rotation when you release the mouse button after finding the best setting.

The Edit modes for color correction haven't changed. They are very basic but workable. I wish they had thought of a before-after toggle, but maybe iPhoto had to be crippled a little so people buy Aperture.

Typically functions are widely spread on the screen. To return to Flickr export, you first choose an album in the list on the left edge of the screen, then press Share in the bottom right corner, then confirm at the top edge of the screen. Even The Gimp does that better. Unfortunately iPhoto has very few keyboard shortcuts.

And why was the important search function hidden behind an hourglass icon? I guess this let them save a handful of pixels, as if screen real estate was in short supply. Most other tools, even the Finder, always show a search field. And the hourglass disappears in photo view mode; iPhoto has become very modal and functions appear, disappear, gray out, and move around in different viewing modes for no apparent reason.

I could go on and on, but the common thread is a lack of coherence, functions scattered widely over the screen, a need to click too many buttons for simple everyday operations, and too many modal dialogs and views.

Apple Aperture

It's not that iPhoto 2011 has become useless. It's just worse than its predecessor, in a way that indicates that it'll get worse from here. But it's still usable. What are the alternatives?

Unfortunately iPhoto stores everything it knows about the photos in a proprietary binary database. The names of photos change too. I am not aware of any method to export photos from iPhoto to another tool without losing ratings, corrections, locations, face tags, and smart albums. iPhoto does not update EXIF photo headers, honni soit qui mal y pense... The only way out is exporting to Apple Aperture.

In many ways, Aperture is the pro version of iPhoto. The basic operation is similar, even many menus, but it adds features that iPhoto lacks. It's very affordable: the price used to be 200 euro for the boxed version, but now it's just 69 euro from the Mac store. It does fix several shortcomings, even the little ones like the missing photo counts in iPhoto 2011 - apparently it didn't get the iOS lobotomy and as a pro tool, hopefully it never will.

Aperture 3 fixes many of my small complaints. It doesn't turn the GUI into a big empty desert, important information is where you need it, and it has a lot of very useful tools and far superior customizability. While iPhoto 2011 has become an annoying toy, Aperture is an useful upgrade. But once you move your photos from iPhoto to Aperture, you must stop using iPhoto because any change made later in iPhoto cannot be incrementally moved to Aperture.

Both iPhoto and Aperture slow your MacOS Lion system to a crawl if you have a large library. It's unbearable. The reason for this is that Spotlight is constantly monitoring iPhoto's and Aperture's countless little files (370,000+ in my case). Since MacOS can only ever do one I/O thing at a time, it's beachball city every time you do something nontrivial with photos. The solution to this is to run the System Preferences, choose Spotlight, select the Privacy tab, and add /Users/yourname/Pictures (or wherever your Aperture Library.aplibrary lives). You can check if you are having this problem by running the Activity Monitor program and sorting the list by %CPU; if mdworker is near the top your Spotlight is madly spinning wheels. I also exclude Aperture from Time Machine backups and use a different method for backups. This makes my computer usable again but I cannot recommend this - if you make a mistake or forget your manual backups, you'll lose all your photos!

Where to next?

The invasion of small-screen iOS ideas in Apple desktop machines does not bode well for Apple. I have always had the feeling that Apple cannot support more than one product at a time; when iOS became the king of the hill everything else went into maintenance. I don't want to get into too much detail, but the desktop MacOS is a pretty castle built on very outdated and creaky foundations; not only the lack of kernel multitasking but also a scary file system, I/O that is either shaky and glacial or so proprietary that there's nothing to connect to, and a GUI that was once the most pleasant on the planet but today is working best where it's closest to what Linux has done for years. Really. (Although Apple GUIs still look prettier, superficially.)

Unfortunately I can't even say that the painful neglect of MacOS and associated tools like iPhoto have benefited iOS. The iPhone and the iPad were brilliant revolutions, but since their introduction progress has been painfully slow. iOS hardware is still the most beautiful but the software... not so much. This makes me very reluctant to update to the next version of iPhoto when one becomes available.

Many years ago I was buying my computers from the coolest and most innovative computer company in the world. Then they got lazy, rested on their laurels, failed to take the world by storm anymore. Finally Silicon Graphics was sold - what an insult! - to Rackspace. Apple filled the gap when it switched to MacOS X, and I have mostly been buying Apple computers ever since.

Where will we go after Apple reaches its zenith? Or refocuses the company on something else again? Or finally becomes just an IP litigation shop like SCO? There are indications of all three already happening. Do I worry too much, or should I be investing less effort in proprietary iPhoto data formats that will never let me move on?

Back to my Apple page.