iLife '11

I've been playing with iLife '11 this afternoon, specifically the new iPhoto. It's pretty nice but I do have some gripes. First the install is large, about 3.5GB and took about 15 minutes. Then it was another 15 minutes to upgrade my iPhoto library. Now Time Machine is backing up 18GB of data over wifi, so that's taking a while.

I tried some of the new slideshow themes. There are still only 12 (I think that's how many there were before) and while the new holiday one with pictures hanging from a thread while snow falls in the backgroud, is cute, it's kinda specific and very similar to another one (just without the snow). I do like the places one which uses geo-tagged info to place the photos on a map and then zooms in to show them. Of course you need to properly assign the tags and so I got caught up fixing some of these. Here is where I ran into a problem.

The new editing stuff is a panel that opens in the right and there's a small map at the bottom and I wish it were bigger. I had tags on my images but not all were correct. I had a group of photos (all of an event) that were in the same place but where listed as two places on the map. Finding which photos they were required selecting each photo one at a time. Changing the place name required typing and doing a new search which didn't always yield the right places. There's also a big map you can get to from the left panel (under photos, events and faces) but you can't move the push pins there. It might be the same as previous versions but it seemed more difficult. Also you can not longer assign a location to a event, you have to go into the event, select all the photos and then pick a place.

Also I found after a little bit of this and rerunning the slideshow (which required downloading maps each time which took 5 minutes) I was using tons of memory and wanted to restart iPhoto. These are all things I expect an update in a couple of weeks to fix.

I know at least one of you is interested in iLife and needs to upgrade to Snow Leopard (required for iLife '11). The Mac Box Set has been updated to include iLife '11 for $129. My guess, based on the Mac Buyer's Guide, is that the MacBook Pros will get an update in a month or two and iWork will get updated at the same time. So you may want to wait (then again, you might not care).