iPhoto 4

First of all: iPhoto 4 is a vast improvement in speed in the organize view. iPhoto 2 was virtually unusable if you had more than 100 or so photos. But other than that it's still the most half-hearted iApp in the iLife suite.

This article contains a altered version of the KeywordMgr.nib that IMHO is a big improvement. Just download it, unzip it and put it in iPhoto/Contents/Resources/English.lproj.

Things this version got right, or almost right:

• You now can delete pictures directly if your looking at them in an album by using Command-Option-Delete. Yes, finally. But there's now way of doing this via drag and drop (drag and drop to the trash just removes the picture from the album, option-drag should move them into the trash but doesn't). I even think that moving a picture to the trash should always move it to the trash and out of the library, the trash can should not be misused to just remove a photo from an album. Moreover if you use Command-Option-Delete to move a picture directly into the trash, then do undo and redo, the redo does not work.
• Rendezvous Sharing
• Smart Playlists
• Speed of the Organize View

They tried to par it up with iTunes, which is a good thing, but sadly there are many points that still need a lot of improvement:

• The main window shows a dirty close button?
• Speed and behavior of the Slideshow
  Still nice looking and ok if you only want to watch your pictures. But the added features for rating and manual movement are utterly slow and unusable. The update of the rating is slower than the picture: press right arrow, wait a second for the picture, wait another second after the picture has been shown for the rating bar to update. And this is on a PowerBook 800mhz, 1GB ram. The trash can is one way only, and again just removes pictures from an album, instead of putting the pictures into the trash (if not started from smart albums or the Library), no way of marking pictures for deletion in albums. And no way of assigning keywords in this mode. Bad move. Please iPhoto developers, have another look at Slides! where you ripped your interface, and do it right. a Slides! has the speed needed, has undoable trash movement. I use this app since I bought my iBook. It's done in Cocoa, it uses only the NSImage classes (I asked the author) and is fast,fast,fast.
• Keyword handling
  This is a major pain in the ass. Since this feature was removed from the bottom of the main window the interface is a total mess.

  

  This was nice. You had to choose if you want to filter or assign, afterwards you used the Keyword Buttons which were radio buttons and everything was fine. My mother understood what to do, everyone did. Of course iPhoto was so slow in this version that nobody really used this feature. No iPhoto is faster, actually so fast that using Keywords is great.
  
  But have a look at the interface:
  What the heck is it? Keywords that are assigend to the currently selected photos show up selected (?) in the table view. To add, remove or rename a keyword you have to select the appropriate menu item from the Keywords dropdown menu (??). Assign and Remove assign or remove the currently selected Keywords to or from the currently selected photos. "Search" filters the current album for the selected Keywords, show all removes that filtering again.
  Renaming: renaming should normally happen by option-clicking on the keyword, or clicking a second time on the keyword when it is selected. But here the nearest thing is double-clicking which filters for the keyword.
  But the main problem with this dialogue is, that the table view of keywords is used for two three different actions: Assigning and Removing, Filtering, and renaming. I'd like to see at least a checkbox in front of every keyword, that determines if this keyword is assigned to the current photo selection or not, instead of just selecting the line. Reordering of the keywords is also important, which is not possible at the moment. And the window grabs the input focus, which is really annoying when you want to categorize many photos. Going back to the context switch for assigning and searching would also be better than this. There are tons of options that could work and be good, but the current is not one of them.
  
  Here's a little improvement I made by altering the nib. Just download it, unzip it and put it in iPhoto/Contents/ Resources/English.lproj. The improvements are:
  • I put the Keywords actions for adding, removing and renaming into the standard buttons that users are familiar from Mail or System Preferences
  • I made the window resizeable (I despise nothing more than fixed size windows with content that is larger and I have to scroll all my way to the stuff. Like the MacOS 9 open dialogue. Horrible. Here I am with a big Cinema Display only to let some darn program display content on a 10 by 10 pixels basis, while it could show my whole harddisc)
  • I added titles and some structure
  • I added a little verboseness to the Assign and Remove Buttons, so normal people get what they are doing.
  • I renamed "Search" to "Filter" because I think it was misleading, and I switched positions, cause you only need show all after you filtered once
  Nevertheless, it still needs a lot of improvement. But the version I came up with is the least I would have expected from Apple.
  
• Being more like iTunes
  by this I mean that iPhoto should provide a better and more prominent interface for keywords and filtering. On top of the things I already mentioned iPhoto should store the metainformation in the jpeg somewhere in the EXIF part, like iTunes does with the ID3 Tags. Information like camera model, flash, originated date, digitized date, size, ... should be displayable and sortable in a kind of list view. It should provide the Information about the Keywords and the rating in the Info dialogue, like iTunes does. There should be a browse interface like in iTunes (tabs could be Year, Rating, Keyword). Albums should open in a new window when you doubleclick them. You should be able to rate a Photo by directly clicking on the stars. You should be able to alter the title of a photo by option-clicking in the organize view.

Why do I write in such a great length about iPhoto? Because I demand excellent or infamous products from Apple when they bundle it with their computers. With excellent products everything is fine, the consumers are happy. With infamous products some third party will jump on the subject and deliver something that does the job right. But with products like iPhoto was, and in some respect even in version 4.0 still is, there is now real competitor. It simply does not make sense for someone to try to do this. You can't provide the iLife integration and no matter what you will be doing, the next version of iPhoto will come and repair some of the stuff you solved with your product. I myself actually thought about doing a nice, fast and simple Photo Library, that would take advantage of the things ridchard k. did with Slides! and put some nice categorization on top. I thought about in autumn 2001. But then rumors about iPhoto came and on macworld 2002 in january iPhoto was there and I was happy that I did not take the effort. So by bundling the iLife suite Apple takes the the responsibility to either do an exceptionally good or exceptionally bad job to provide the customers with descent solutions. iPhoto was inbetween, too good to not use it, too bad (most importantly slow) to really work with it.