iPhoto 5, hero and zero

My copy of iLife '05 has arrived! The app I was looking forward to most was iPhoto 5, in particular the long-awaited addition of folders to help you organise your albums. However there are apparently numerous problems: MacOSXHints, MacInTouch, Accelerate Your Mac, and MaxFixIt have all had reports. The MacOSXHints article in particular specifically concerns a problem with folders. This problem did not affect me for some reason - although MacOSXHints has included a solution if it does start to occur.

My own experiences so far have been generally good, with the one glaring exception of exporting photo galleries for the web. Don't get me wrong, iPhoto's web export works pretty much as it always has (pretty well, but not great), but neither of my preferred web-export plugins, BetterHTMLExport and PhotoToWeb, work with iPhoto 5. They look like they're working, but no images get exported. BetterHTMLExport's webpage states that the developer is aware of the problem.

Also a concern is that iPhoto 5 seems to be noticeably slower than iPhoto 4. In particular opening images used to be instantaneous. Now you have to sit and wait while iPhoto displays your selected thumbnail for a second or two in the centre of a large empty black box before the full-size image fills the window. I've also heard that it is almost useless on a Mac with a G3 processor - most of the editing functions do not work and navigation is painfully slow.

26/1/05 - Update: At some point in the last few hours BetterHTMLExport was updated to version 2.1 and is now compatible with iPhoto 5!

27/1/05 - Further update: Ack! I just noticed that Keyword Assistant has vanished! I refuse to even attempt to assign keywords without this wonderful piece of software. Luckily it appears that there is an iPhoto 5 version going through beta-testing right now.

Related entries

iPhoto 5.0.1 but not on Software Update - 2 February 2005
Finally! - 11 January 2005
iPhoto tip - 26 March 2004
Site update - 4 February 2004
Keyword Assistant updated! - 3 February 2005
Stop iphoto from importing images - 14 January 2005
Aperture gets torn a new one by the mighty Ars - 5 December 2005
Automatically copy Bluetoothed images into iPhoto - 14 January 2005
Preventing iPhoto albums from appearing in your screensavers preference pane - 28 June 2006