Why I stopped using iPhoto. I made a big move today. After using iPhoto since its unveiling in January, I removed the program from my PowerBook today. Why? Because the combination of my having just 192 megabytes of RAM and a photo library for this year that is 800 shots and growing, combined with iPhoto 1.1.1 was dragging my laptop to its knees anytime I wanted to do anything with my photos.The decision to dump iPhoto was really pretty easy to make. Ever since I started using it, iPhoto has been a serious compromise. It fails to render photos clearly in its slideshow feature – at least on my machine and with the large TIFF images I had stored in the database. It also takes up extraneous hard disk resources with all of the thumbnails and other features built into each day’s photo database. In additional to iPhoto 1.1.1 being a 63 megabyte application, the database it created to hold my 800 photos took up another megabyte of space over and above the actual photo data.
Yes, I know that storage space is cheap, and I will buy new RAM soon to make this laptop more snappy with OS X in general, but in my use, iPhoto just doesn’t offer as many pluses as minuses for this photographer.
I will take a look at other photo management options now, including iView MediaPro 1.5 and using my old system working with the excellent GraphicConverter program and its folder browsing capabilities. iView MediaPro offers higher-end features than iPhoto for its $65 cost, while GraphicConverter offers access to more file formats than you could imagine for its $35 cost.
I am not advocating that anyone else stop using iPhoto. Like Apple’s Mail application, if the simple capabilities of iPhoto work for you then there is no reason to look for more advanced photo managment solutions. I was just tired of my Mac slowing down every time I wanted to scroll through my images in iPhoto. After all, iPhoto is little more than a shoebox to store your photos – especially if you do your photo editing in another application. The shoebox just doesn’t fit me any more.
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