Sunday, November 07, 2010

iPhoto '11 Annoyances

I was playing with the new iPhoto, putting my pictures of my trip to the Kitt Peak Observatory on flickr. It worked reasonably well though I did run into a few annoyances with the new version.
I don't quite remember how it worked in the last version but now the editing controls are on a right-hand panel and divided into three tabs. There's still a lot of empty space below the control and I find I'm switching between tabs often which seem unnecessary. If I use the Enhance button, I have to the Adjust tab to fine tune things. I also have to go back to the first tab to crop or straighten the photo.

It's a little difficult reordering photos in an album. The drop zone is a little to small.

The last version had a nice full screen compare mode where you could see two photos, side-by-side as large as they would fit in the screen to compare them. I couldn't figure out how to do this in the new version and had to look in the Help, which isn't very Apple-like. It turns out you select them both and go into Edit mode. That's fine though it means the Edit panel is visible on the right so the photos are that much smaller.

If you right-click on a photo a little hud-like menu appears. I can't reproduce it now, but I was in a state where the photo was rated with stars but the menu didn't show them.

iPhoto supports two kinds of slideshows. One is instant, just select photos and click a button and a slideshow starts. For more control you can create a saved slideshow which lets you reorder photos and remembers theme and music settings. When creating a saved slideshow iPhoto crashed on me and I don't think you can edit slideshows in fullscreen mode. When you create a slideshow iPhoto chooses how many photos to show per slide, it seems to vary between one and four and iPhoto makes good choices about half the time. Which means I want to change this for the other half, but I can't figure out a way to do so.

They removed the Set Desktop button that used to be on the bottom toolbar. Now it's just a Menu item without a hotkey (I know I can add one in System Preferences). It would be nice if it was in the Share button popup.

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