Wednesday, August 08, 2007

iPhoto 7 (iLife 2008): again, no Library merges

[Update: the link won't work because Apple deleted my post within 2 hours of my posting it. I'm not surprised. Maybe their vigilant reaction is a sign they're feeling some heat about this issue. There are very active complaint threads this morning about library merging.]

From my post on Apple's Discussion group (corrected because iLife 2008 is iPhoto 7, not iPhoto 8)
Apple - Support - Discussions - Feature request for iPhoto 8: Import ...:

You're traveling with your MacBook. Organizing photos, adding metadata, creating albums, slideshows, etc. You get home. You want to import your travel library to the main library, preserving ALL the versions and metadata.

You have just married the Mac Geek of your dreams. You need to merge Libraries into the shared folder (which can't be shared over a network, but let's just ignore that). How do you do that?

You created and used separate Libraries back with iPhoto bogged down at 2000 images. Now you want to combine them, preserving version relationships, album relationships, descriptions, titles, keywords, roll information, photo books, slideshows, etc, etc.

Yes, I know about iPhoto Library Manager. I license and use it. It does miracles with Apple's limited merge support, but some metadata is lost. I also had so many issues with earlier version merges that, even though I use it all the time, I'm gun-shy. Sorry, merging Libraries is very complex. It's hard to believe that anyone but Apple can do it safely.

iLife 2008 (iPhoto 7) is the fourth release in a row to disappoint those of us asking for Library management.

Choices? Aperture, which Apple clearly intends us to buy instead, doesn't allow one to edit dates on images (good-bye scans!), is dog slow (appallingly slow - still) by design, and can't handle video. Others? They don't import iPhoto Libraries. I ain't redoing metadata on 14,000 images.

Anyone interested in putting together an online petition to ask Apple to add Libary merge/import/management to iPhoto 2009? Picket Cupertino maybe?

I ordered it, of course. What choice do I have?

No comments: