too many words by laura lemay

photopod

So by now everyone knows about the new iPod photo that’s been announced with the color screen that you can use to view photographs. Goody.

But you sync photographs onto the iPod using…iTunes. Buh? Pardon? Apple *has* a tool for dealing with photos: iPhoto. Now, OK, iPhoto is not the best product. I use it and I am not happy with it. Its easy to use for really basic importing and building slideshows but really cumbersome for anything more complex. It bogs down if you put any large number of photos into it. Its organization of the photos on the filesystem is labyrinthine and nasty. And it doesn’t provide an easy way of searching or sorting photos on metatdata the way that iTunes has (smart playlists: godlike). I have cursed iPhoto over and over and over again, wishing it were remotely as good a program as iTunes. (and before you all sent me mail, yes I am looking at flickr).

With the photopod this was Apple’s chance to revamp iPhoto, to make it the photo organization program everyone wants to use the same way they did with iTunes. They could have built syncing with the iPod into iPhoto and driven iPod users to using iPhoto. Add a web-based photo organizer like flickr or better integration one of the net photo printing services and Apple could have really had a chance to grab the photo market the same way they did the music market.

They didn’t do any of that. Sync your photos with iTunes? That doesn’t make any sense.

But I’ve been wrong before about ipod stuff, so we’ll see.

And while I’m here, the black iPod{.broken_link} would be kind of neat if it weren’t for all that U2 stuff.