The main programs I use are Iphoto and Itunes. Since Itunes is free (and if you have an Ipod, you have no choice), I'll concern myself with Iphoto and not rate the other programs in the suite. I have not upgraded to Ilife 08, nor do I have any plans to.
Although Iphoto is not free, a lot of programs rely on it (such as ComicLife) so not using Iphoto is almost not a choice.
First of all, if you have a substantial photo collection (mine is over 40,000 images), you need to have memory. I found that Iphoto was very slow until I put 2gb into my Mac Mini (which is the most mine will take). Now it's just a little slow. Second, Iphoto is VERY picky about your photo collection. Once you've "imported" your photos, Iphoto doesn't like you to touch them, except in Iphoto. Although Iphoto allows you to keep originals outside the Iphoto library, this makes the library extremely fragile and prevents some features from working properly because Iphoto simply stores each photo as a symbolic link to the original. When you "export" your photos to a CD, you get a CD full of useless symbolic links. I keep my entire library on an external drive. This keeps the library together, and everything works (and - I can back up the entire library). There is no obvious provision for doing something to a photo outside of Iphoto (for example, if the "photo" is actually exported from a graphics program, or "printed" from a document). Unlike Itunes (which is a master of background processing), Iphoto forces you to sit through tedious "progress" screens whenever you do anything time-consuming (which is most batch operations). If you (for example) create a movie from a slideshow, you cannot do anything else in Iphoto except watch the progress bar. Even duplicating a photo takes a little while. Iphoto gives you albums, smart albums (albums based on some selection criteria), and folders (and folders of folders) to organize your photos, however it does not let you create an album in a folder (you have to create it and drag it into the folder) and does not provide the option of sorting albums within a folder (you get to do this manually - a real pain). Although you can have more than one Iphoto library, you cannot have more than one open at once, or easily copy between them (there are external programs which do this, but these simply issue Iphoto commands, so you get to sit through the whole tedious process, and these sometimes lose information like album comments).
Once you get used to Iphoto's many quirks, it's a great program. I've never been able to access all of my photos so easily. The thumbnail views are resizable (so you can have tiny to quite large thumbnails, depending on what you are looking for) and the full screen view gives you some limited (but usually sufficient) editing options. The slideshows (using the Ken Burns moving picture effect) are beautiful, and one can export these to Quicktime movies for making DVDs (this is a better choice than creating the slideshow in Idvd, unless you like tiny pictures). One can also create books, calendars, order prints, and there are plug-ins for exporting to various photo sites (such as Picassa). One can also create emails with photos (which is a great feature - it's the only way to create an editable document containing a set of photos sized for printing), export photos (in various sizes) and create very bare-bones web albums (without exporting to iweb).
I'd give Iphoto more stars if it made organization easier (create album in folder, keep folder sorted, smart folders of albums), was less dependent on drag/drop (tedious with huge lists of albums), worked better with other graphics programs (having to duplicate a photo first to create a variant of it is a real pain, and not automatically refreshing thumbnails makes working with native Photoshop originals exported as JPGs a real pain), and was better at background tasks.
one note about the other programs in the suite..
Itunes - one of my favorites. I'm running the latest and it keeps getting better (I gave Iphoto less stars, since I know that Apple knows how to do background tasks when they want to).
Iweb - this is NOT a general purpose web editor (like Dreamweaver or Frontpage), but an editor for a templated web site. If you export all of you albums to Iweb, you will quickly get a rather awkward site. It is not easy to create a site which looks any different from the somewhat gimmicky templates.
idvd - take Quicktime movies and photos and create DVDs for playing in a DVD player. Photo slide shows are rather primitive compared to what you can do in Iphoto.
imovie - never used. I find the "pro" version of quicktime (with cut/paste features) much easier to use.
garageband - never used.
Obviously lacking in this suite is anything to do with creating documents which combine words and images. I guess you need to buy Iwork (and get some more unneeded programs).Get more detail about Apple iLife '06 (Mac DVD) [OLD VERSION].
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