Long before I began using iPhoto I had heard it described as the final piece of the puzzle in the new Unix-based Apple operating system, known as OS X (as in the Roman numeral 10).
I couldn’t fathom how a photo- editing package would complete an OS when Microsoft was pushing hard to integrate Web communication software such as messaging and media players into its Windows operating system. I still don’t know the answer but iPhoto is quite something.
It’s by far the most user-friendly package of this nature I’ve encountered. The camera is the most common digital peripheral, and the thing most consumers want to do is see their photographs, fiddle with them and invariably e-mail them to family and friends. But this has been easier said than done in the past.
Apple’s boss Steve Jobs called it the “chain of pain”: importing, editing and printing digital pictures. But iPhoto overcomes this. It imports the pictures simply and displays them as thumbnails that can be resized on the fly. This is its most impressive feature because it handles many images of different resolution, from tiny to full-screen, all in real time.
Many of these features have been available in other programs over the past few years, but iPhoto is a cut above the rest.
Rotating the image, for instance, is done by clicking on one button. Cropping is as easy, with constraints that make the image fit to the most common photo formats.
You can display your images by creating albums, then let them run as a slide show. This scrolls the images every five seconds across the full screen of the iMac’s super-clear flat-panel monitor. What I particularly like is that iPhoto puts all imported pictures into one central photo library, not a series of folders named by date or time.
The software always remembers the last import, as well as the nominal rolls of film, in case you ever want to rearrange them afterwards.
The procedure to import images is much easier than anything else I’ve ever tried. To test this I used the HP Photosmart 318 digital camera. To import images to my laptop, I had to install its bundled software. The iMac recognised it as soon as I plugged it in, launched iPhoto and “hey presto!”
I took the images, edited them and turned them into an HTML page. I was able to create a page in five mouse clicks — an impressive feature for the average consumer.
Another bonus is that you can export the pictures as a Quicktime file, so that they play as a slide show in this popular movie clip format, or as smaller images at a lower resolution for e-mailing.
All of these export functions let you choose from a variety of templates and fiddle with the backgrounds and titles. Windows packages have been doing this for longer, but iPhoto does it better and easier.
The iMovie package that lets you create your own films is just as easy to use. To edit a video, I asked photographer Daron Chatz for help, but I didn’t need assistance because the interface is simple enough.
The main window has a panel down the right for the clips and a bar that runs across the bottom of the screen for the sequence of the movie, known as the timeline.
Most of the editing was drag-and-drop, dragging the clips on to the timeline and inserting transitions between them where needed.
I inserted a soundtrack, edited a few of the clips quite easily and even inverted one so that it zoomed out instead of in. I also found that if necessary, you can edit frame by frame.
The more sophisticated effects were as easy, letting me insert titles, make clips run in slow motion, adjust the colour saturation and make the image black-and-white or sepia. But it also let me give up my edits and restore the image to the original at any point.
Chatz was just as enthusiastic about these effects, using the word “amazing” often.
“The point is, it’s all pre-automated. In professional editing programs you have to set everything up yourself. The controls are very user-friendly. It’s not complex but it’s high-power,” he concluded. I agree.