I’m a massive Apple Fan-boy. I own an iMac, MacBook Pro, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPod Classic and Apple TV. I like/love their products because they work together in harmony and generally make certain things in life easier. They also look awesome.
However, recently I’ve become frustrated with one particular Apple product and one that I use frequently – iPhoto. That free bit of software you get with your new Mac, one that costs comparatively little to upgrade from the App store.
The problem that I have with iPhoto is the way is doesn’t really synchronise across my devices. True, they’ve created Photo Stream, but this has only been handy when I’ve taken a photo on my iPad or iPhone and I can access it on my computer without having to connect my devices and download them.
What I’d really like, is to have one library, the same library that I can access on my different computers. Instead, I have two macs, each with their own iPhoto library. I have to spend ages importing photos to both sets of macs, creating an event and generally organising them in some anal way.
What I’d really like is to use Dropbox or some other cloud service that lets me store my photos in folders and then two identical programs on each computer can download from there whenever I put new photos in the cloud. No excessive organisation, just me putting my new photos into a folder one computer and being available on the other whilst being automatically imported by a half-decent piece of software.
The problem with iPhoto is that it can’t do this. iPhoto puts all your photos into a single library file. My single file is about 35GB, so if I have that file in dropbox and update that library with just one photo, the entire 35GB file has to be uploaded to dropbox, then downloaded on to my other computer. Not exactly practical.
So at the moment, I’m sticking my photos into Dropbox and am looking for decent software for my computers for photo management and basic editing. At the moment I’m looking at Picasa, Google’s free photo management/editing software. I like it, but it’d be nice to be able to upload to Flickr from there. I’ve looked into Lightroom, but I’m skint so paying out a load of money isn’t something I’m looking to do right now. Anyone got any decent suggestions?
Matt Keil 