An Oddball Project Idea
I sort of want to switch to a Mac full time. My work happened to have a number of G5 Power Macs that weren't getting used, and I support Macs as part of my day job, so they were ok with me taking one home to tool around on. So I've got a system loaded up with as much extra RAM as we had handy at home. It doesn't play World of Warcraft as well as my PC (the video card in the Mac is lacking), but it should be able to handle everything else I'd want to do just fine.
I already use iTunes on my PC, so that's obviously not a problem. I turned off iTunes automatic management of my files; I've got them arranged on the hard disk as I like them already. I don't know of a good way to keep my playlists, but I didn't have many of them anyway. I can just re-create them on the new computer. I haven't gotten into Office type stuff yet, but I'm not worried about it because I tend to use Google Docs for that sort of thing now anyway. All the movies I've tried opening worked once I installed DivX and Windows Media codecs.
But all of my photos are a problem. I use Google's Picasa on my PC, and I love it. Simple, clean interface, basic retouching, and it's fast as all heck. I've got about 3000 digital photos in RAW and JPEG formats (about 8.9 GB worth), and even on a fresh install of Windows and Picasa it can load them all up into it's database in a few minutes. Searching and browsing is snappy, and it arranges photos based on the folder they're in, so if you've already got your photos organized (or you've used Picasa from the beginning), all your photos will be where you expect them.
For some reason, I expected iPhoto to behave pretty much the same way. It does not. In fact, it flat out sucks. I've got a dual 2.0 GHz PowerPC G5 computer with 4 GB of RAM, and it's *slow*. I copied all my photos from one computer to the other, and then once they were on local disk, imported them into iPhoto. I wasn't timing it, but it took well over half an hour. I stopped paying attention and went to watch TV eventually. That's ridiculously slow for that sort of machine.
I then went to browse through my pictures, and see if I could find some ones I recently took of my nieces. My nice organized folders? Gone. Now all of my pictures are organized by date. And that's only right if the timestamps on the files are right. Not all of my photos have accurate EXIF information, so they aren't going to get organized into the right place. (My wedding photos are a good example of that; I certainly didn't take them, being busy getting married, and my photographer changed some things around on the photos before she delivered them).
I think the idea is that you're supposed to tag your photos (F-Spot does the same thing, I think), but screw that. I have 3000 photos, I'm not going to go back and relabel them all when I had them properly sorted in the first place.
To make matters worse, iPhoto does the same thing that iTunes does by default, and copies your photos to its own directory and organizes them the way it likes. So that's probably the reason the import took forever; it made a second copy of every damn photo. 8.9 GB space wasted on my hard disk if I wasn't paying attention.
And last, it's just plain slow. Scrolling through pictures is choppy, where Picasa manages is with ease.
According to Apple's web site, iPhoto '08 may be better. It should at least get the organization thing right. I'm not really inclined to pay the $79 bucks to try it though, based off my experience with the older version. (I think this particular computer came with iLife '05.) I haven't even tried retouching photos in iPhoto; I don't know how well that works.
So that brings me to my oddball project idea. How hard would it be to write a Picasa clone for the Mac? The basic things that I want: good organization and some basic photo retouching; don't sound all that hard to do. Getting up to the level of polish and speed that Picasa exhibits sounds difficult, but just something to help me handle my photos doesn't sound beyond the realm of possibility for one person. I like working in Cocoa, so I think I might give that a shot.
I already use iTunes on my PC, so that's obviously not a problem. I turned off iTunes automatic management of my files; I've got them arranged on the hard disk as I like them already. I don't know of a good way to keep my playlists, but I didn't have many of them anyway. I can just re-create them on the new computer. I haven't gotten into Office type stuff yet, but I'm not worried about it because I tend to use Google Docs for that sort of thing now anyway. All the movies I've tried opening worked once I installed DivX and Windows Media codecs.
But all of my photos are a problem. I use Google's Picasa on my PC, and I love it. Simple, clean interface, basic retouching, and it's fast as all heck. I've got about 3000 digital photos in RAW and JPEG formats (about 8.9 GB worth), and even on a fresh install of Windows and Picasa it can load them all up into it's database in a few minutes. Searching and browsing is snappy, and it arranges photos based on the folder they're in, so if you've already got your photos organized (or you've used Picasa from the beginning), all your photos will be where you expect them.
For some reason, I expected iPhoto to behave pretty much the same way. It does not. In fact, it flat out sucks. I've got a dual 2.0 GHz PowerPC G5 computer with 4 GB of RAM, and it's *slow*. I copied all my photos from one computer to the other, and then once they were on local disk, imported them into iPhoto. I wasn't timing it, but it took well over half an hour. I stopped paying attention and went to watch TV eventually. That's ridiculously slow for that sort of machine.
I then went to browse through my pictures, and see if I could find some ones I recently took of my nieces. My nice organized folders? Gone. Now all of my pictures are organized by date. And that's only right if the timestamps on the files are right. Not all of my photos have accurate EXIF information, so they aren't going to get organized into the right place. (My wedding photos are a good example of that; I certainly didn't take them, being busy getting married, and my photographer changed some things around on the photos before she delivered them).
I think the idea is that you're supposed to tag your photos (F-Spot does the same thing, I think), but screw that. I have 3000 photos, I'm not going to go back and relabel them all when I had them properly sorted in the first place.
To make matters worse, iPhoto does the same thing that iTunes does by default, and copies your photos to its own directory and organizes them the way it likes. So that's probably the reason the import took forever; it made a second copy of every damn photo. 8.9 GB space wasted on my hard disk if I wasn't paying attention.
And last, it's just plain slow. Scrolling through pictures is choppy, where Picasa manages is with ease.
According to Apple's web site, iPhoto '08 may be better. It should at least get the organization thing right. I'm not really inclined to pay the $79 bucks to try it though, based off my experience with the older version. (I think this particular computer came with iLife '05.) I haven't even tried retouching photos in iPhoto; I don't know how well that works.
So that brings me to my oddball project idea. How hard would it be to write a Picasa clone for the Mac? The basic things that I want: good organization and some basic photo retouching; don't sound all that hard to do. Getting up to the level of polish and speed that Picasa exhibits sounds difficult, but just something to help me handle my photos doesn't sound beyond the realm of possibility for one person. I like working in Cocoa, so I think I might give that a shot.
posted by Jonathan at
1:43 PM
1 Comments:
I have the same sentiment as you. I tried lots of photo management software and settle on iView Media Pro. They've been bought by Microsoft though and is now called Expression Media.
Although I have some good news:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/15/exclusive-google-developing-mac-version-of-picasa-due-to-be-released-this-year/
By
Obsidian, At
January 30, 2008 4:03 PM
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