Review by Kendall L. Vaughan

iPhoto has a long ways to go before becoming a great organizer. Events seemed like a great idea when they were released in iPhoto 08 but the trouble with them is that you can’t put events inside of other events. The reason this is such a problem is that after you load so many thousands of photographs there becomes to many events and it becomes cumbersome to sludge through them all.

Their solution to this problem in 08 was the add the ability to merge events together. When this happens everything becomes one large event, it doesn’t maintain the groups of the events you merge together. I guess I can forgive them not totally thinking this feature though in iPhoto 08 but nearly a year and a half later they should have got this right by now. Adding events inside of events is a lot more important than even features like faces and places.

Doing a search is also limiting from the search box. You can’t set multiple search criteria at a time like in the Finder or Adobe Bridge. In other words I can’t say show me the files with these keywords that were taken during this time period and have this rating. I can only do one at a time. Yes I can do this with a smart folder but I would like to have option not to since I don’t always want to come back to the search later.

Posting to Facebook and Flickr only gives you access to some of the features on those sites. You can’t enter in all the information about the pictures from directly with in iPhoto (captions for photos, who can see the pictures, what should be the key photograph for an album etc.) Also iPhoto doesn’t pull the previous albums you created back in to iPhoto so you can only view some of your albums not all of them.

If you ever have to move your information to a new hard drive down the road all the work you did to put together slide shows won’t come across with the rest of the photos. I found this out the hard way as a spent a lot of time setting up manual Ken Burns effects so that they would pan from one particular area of a photograph to another. Now the only way a can access them is to boot back and forth between my old hard drive. It is a good thing I happen to have two drives in my machine or I would have to recreate them. I imagine this is what you would have to do if you had a laptop.

The recent area on the sidebar only shows the last event you look at. This is ok but I would like to see a history of the last several events I viewed. The last 12 months area doesn’t organize those photos by events so you just gets this massive number of photos which isn’t very convenient.