I think I had iPhoto v. 2.0. I don't know if any of the following problems have been addressed in subsequent releases. Some of the problems I had with iPhoto:

Levels of organization were very limited. Albums were basically the only sorting mechanism. I would really have liked to have been able to make hierarchies, with a few "sub-albums" within any given album. I find hierarchical structures to be an effective organization technique, especially when dealing with large sets of files.

No batch renaming or info editing abilities. This was especially bad since I had a large number of files and many of them were older scanned images with incorrect dates.

Name and date changes in iPhoto were not reflected in the original image file. Files were still named "Pic 0010234.jpg" in finder after being renamed in iPhoto.

Captive file folder structure with lots of artifacts like document files and thumbnail images. It was very hard for me to locate specific images outside of iPhoto to open in any other application, such as email or another image editor. The email option included in iPhoto itself was also quite limited, since it retained the original file names, such as "Pic 0010234.jpg" instead of indicating the name associated with the image in iPhoto. I also had problems if I tried to send these email messages after quitting iPhoto.

The speed of iPhoto goes down considerably as image libraries get larger. To keep the speed reasonable, I had to get a companion program (iPhoto Buddy) that allowed me to run multiple libraries. Hardly an elegant solution, especially if you're often going back and forth between libraries.

These are some of my personal experiences with iPhoto. I wanted two things in an image program: organiztional capacity and functionality. iPhoto offered very little in the way of either of these. It does have some other functions, like creating slide shows and ordering prints, that I never made use of. iPhoto might be much better suited to a more casual user who took advantage of these more "cosmetic" capabilities.

One question: I put lots of carriage returns in when writing my message board posts, but when they show up, they're just humongeous blocks of text (not very pleasing to look at, I know). According to the info above the message box, "a blank line starts a new paragraph," but I don't see it. Do I need to use some HTML tag?

Adrian_Down

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Add EXIF data to batch rename