Transitioning from iView Media Pro to iTunes 6 (iLife 06)

I've been getting frustrated with iView Media Pro for quite a while now. My initial years of extolling iView's great features have been followed more recently with serious speed problems and frustrations over their more recent upgrade pricing policies. So, I decided I would give iPhoto another shot with the new version 6 (iWork '06) version.

The first significant discovery for me was the fact that iPhoto 6 allows you to import photos without copying them into you iPhoto library—so you don't have to compromise the way you store your photos. When you import a photo iPhoto creates an alias to the original and then makes a local thumbnail.

My next discovery (which won't be new to anyone who's familiar with iPhoto) is the ease with which you can create a backup onto CD. You just select you're photo's, click burn, and it creates a CD which, when mounted, appears as an album in iPhoto. The pictures retain the keywords you gave them, and also retain their originals if you edited them in iPhoto, though you have to copy the pictures into your working library to use the 'revert to original command'.

Unfortunately, the backup CD doesn't appear to retain a copy of the albums that pictures were sorted into at the time you backed up - so you can't sort pictures into albums as a mechanism for providing metadata.

Also, there's no clear way of retaining a local copy of thumbnails of backed up CDs to make it easier to find pictures that are archived away. Indeed, I discovered that iPhoto doesn't really cope very well with importing images (without copying) from removable media. If you try to view the images, iPhoto asks you to insert the media they were on, but doesn't tell you anything about the media - like the CD name.

So, although it may appear that I've found a lot of problems with iPhoto, I'm actually much happier with it than with iView. It is working reliably, the interface is very consistent and effective, and, well… it's just nice.

Finally, I noticed Keyword Assistant that looks like it will be useful once it's upgrade for iPhoto 6.