Although digital cameras may make your imaging workflow much faster and cheaper, they also make it possible to generate incredible amounts of data. Organizing and managing a large library of photos requires a good image-cataloging application. And while iPhoto has long had one of the best interfaces of any Mac-based photo cataloger, its feature set and performance have not been up to pro (or semi-pro) standards. Fortunately, the new version sports performance improvements, and one or two features that improve its appeal for more serious photo management workflows.

There are several very good image catalogers for the Mac that sport the features you need to manage complex production cycles, be they Web, print, or photography production (Extensis Portfolio and Canto Cumulus come to mind). But iPhoto’s low price and simple, straightforward interface give it special appeal. Is it up to tackling more than simple consumer tasks? IPhoto, therefore iOrganize Though iPhoto was free for the first 3 releases, version 4 is now only available as part of iLife, Apple’s $49 suite of digital media applications — iDVD, iMovie, iTunes, and GarageBand.

But at $49, iPhoto would be a good deal even as a standalone product. The big appeal with iPhoto, of course, is its ease of use and standard interface in line with the other iLife applications. If you’re already used to an application like iTunes, iPhoto feels very familiar. Even OS X 10.3’s new Finder windows feel very similar to the iApps, meaning that there’s a very smooth integration of interface between Apple’s core applications and the Finder. Overall, the iPhoto interface has not changed. The left pane of the main window features the Source List where you can switch between viewing your entire library, or an album of pictures culled from that library. The images themselves appear in the right-hand pane as thumbnails or full-size images.

IPhoto 4, though, adds a few new features to the Source list, which should be familiar to users of the current version of iTunes (see Figure 1). Figure 1: iPhoto’s interface remains mostly unchanged, but for the new entries in the Source List on the left. Note that the Library is automatically delineated by date. ISmarter Smart Albums let you create an album that’s automatically populated with images from your main library according to an easily defined set of rules. So, you can create an album that automatically displays all images shot on a particular date, or that includes particular comment text or naming characteristics.

A new rating feature lets you assign a star rating of 1 to 5 to each image, and you can create a Smart Album that automatically selects pictures with a given rating. You can define multiple rules for a Smart Album, and re-define the rules at any time. Smart Albums are a very handy addition and are very well implemented. For a production workflow, they allow you to automatically organize images based on filename, meaning your photographers can do a lot of your organization work for you, by simply following a nomenclature that matches your Smart Album rules (see Figure 2). Figure 2: Smart Albums can be quickly defined by setting up a series of rules that automatically filter your library for matching images. Though the Smart Album rule set is thorough, we were disappointed that there’s no facility for building rules based on an image’s appearance, a feature that’s been available in other image catalogers for years.

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Smart Albums also take advantage of iPhoto’s new Rendezvous networking support. In the iPhoto Preferences dialog, you can opt to turn on Sharing, which allows you to publish any or all Smart Albums to the Rendezvous network. You can define a single password for access to your computer’s albums, but there’s no way to define separate accounts for each album. Because Rendezvous networking is automatic – your other Macs simply need to be on the same LAN, and running iPhoto 4 – there’s no additional configuration required. Just launch iPhoto, and it will automatically find any Shared folders and display them in the Source list under the name of the host computer. Client computers can copy items from the album to their own library, but they can’t edit, delete, or add items, so the program’s workgroup functionality is somewhat limited.

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You can work around the program’s read-only functionality by copying images to your own computer for editing, but you won’t be able to return them to the original server, making for potential version-tracking hassles. In addition, security is pretty lax. You can define a password for your computer, but you can’t set up separate accounts or limit access to particular shared albums. Still, the ability to easily move photos around the network is handy and simple to do. IFaster Perhaps the most important feature is iPhoto’s improved performance. With features like variably scaling thumbnails, iPhoto has always been resource hungry.

Unfortunately, with previous versions, once your library hit a few thousand images, performance bogged down tremendously. Not so with the new version.

Apple claims that the application can now handle up to 25,000 images without a performance hit. Though we didn’t quite pump it up that much, we did immediately notice much faster performance in handling our existing iPhoto library of 2,500 images. After throwing in a couple of thousand more, we still didn’t see a slow-down. Scrolling, opening images, changing albums, switching between the program’s modes — everything is faster in iPhoto. These improvements go a long way toward making iPhoto a more-practical cataloging tool.

Finally, iPhoto activities can be scripted. The application offers a decent AppleScript library, meaning you can automate many of your tasks. Unfortunately, iPhoto’s AppleScript features have not been upgraded or enhanced since version 2.

INnoying iPhoto’s biggest problem remains the underlying nature of its cataloging process. When you import images into iPhoto — either by importing them from a camera, or copying them from your drive or another volume — those images are copied into the iPhoto master library. So, if you have CDs of archived images that you want to catalog, you’ll have to give up an equivalent amount of space on your hard drive. What’s more, when it copies the photos, it renames them according to its own arcane, proprietary naming scheme. So, if you want to get an image out of the iPhoto library, you have to use iPhoto’s export. You can’t just move things at the Finder level.

The inability to catalog off-line volumes remains iPhoto’s main detriment when compared to more expensive cataloging applications like iView Multimedia’s MediaPro or Extensis’s Portfolio. Because images must remain on-line, you’ll most likely find iPhoto only practical for current projects, where you don’t mind having to keep your media on-line.

Conclusion iPhoto is no substitute for a professional-level cataloger like Canto Cumulus, iView MediaPro, or Extensis Portfolio, but then Apple doesn’t claim that it is. However, the new version’s performance improvements, sharing and Smart Album features, combined with its low price and excellent interface, mean that it might be perfectly suitable for simpler projects and small workgroups. If you don’t need a more expensive full-blown cataloger, iPhoto is worth checking out.

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