iLife 08 iPhoto Export & iWeb Challenges

One of the commands that I use the most in iPhoto is export. 

Apple has made it a mobile command by moving it around a little.  I wrote about that in Apple Consistency about a year and one half ago.

I have gotten used to the location of export, and iPhoto remains one of my favorite software products.

In fact iPhoto is one of the products that have kept me on the Mac.  I bought the 08 Version soon after announcement.

I installed it on my Mac in Virginia a week or so ago.  That isn't my main Mac, but I wanted to see what problems I would run into before putting it on my MacBook which is often with me on the coast in NC.

The installation went well, I stuck a SD memory chip in a reader and uploaded some new photos.

I then tried to "Export" one of the photos to use in my Typepad blog.  The export command didn't work.  Nothing happened.  I ended up emailing the photo to myself and using it that way.

I did not have a lot of time to fool with it at the time and just chalked it up to one of those weird things that sometimes happen.

About a week later in NC,  I installed iLife 08 on the second of my three Macs, still keeping it away from my main machine, the MacBook.

Once again Export didn't work.  I had actually looked at the read me after my unsuccessful export attempt.  It read more like a marketing document rather than something someone needed to read before installing software.

Today I did some searching on the web, and I found that any third party export plug-ins like Flickr or Picassa will cause export to fail.  That would have been a nice to include fact in the read me.

There are a couple of helpful articles.  The first thread is at MacWorld.  The second is at Apple but isn't as helpful as it could be.

I love this instruction from the Apple thread.

The easiest way to deal with them is turn them off from the Info window for the application. Select iPhoto (the application) and get info (cmd-i)

Go down to the Plug-ins part of the info window and find all the plug-ins you might have installed (many are part of iPhoto so be careful)

Uncheck the plug-ins installed for exporting to Flickr, Facebook or the like. Then launch iPhoto and try to export.

Well if many are part of iPhoto how about detailing those?  I did the show package method and deleted plug-ins.  Unfortunately I ended up with only Quicktime export working.

I tried reinstalling, but it didn't want to do that since there already had been an iPhoto software update.

I finally just threw away iPhoto, reinstalled iPhoto 08, and did the iPhoto software update again and export worked fine.  It was a minor problem, but I bet one that many users saw.

I haven't spent much time with the new iPhoto but my initial impression is that it is much easier to do web albums, but the export panel isn't as efficient or perhaps as quick to use.

I do really like the options that people viewing the albums are given.  Apple has done a really nice job there.

This the link to my .Mac web gallery.  Not surprisingly the Picasa favorites are also available at my Picasa Web Albums and a few of the same photos are in a set at my Ocracokewaves Flickr site.  You can decide which you like the best.

I think web albums part of iLife is much better than the iWeb way of publishing photos.  It's almost as good as the original iPhoto way of doing it. :)  Of course I now have published photos in all three versions.  I'm not sure how I manage the older ones.

I have one philosophical problem with the way Apple manages the web albums.  If you make a mistake like I did and only publish one picture, the only way to get it off the web is to delete it in the web gallery section of iPhoto on my Mac.

It would make a whole lot more sense if you could manage it from the web instead of using an application on your computer.

That of course brings up the fatal flaw on iWeb. It ties the website to your computer. Then it blissfully ignores what might have been done by another computer also hooked to your .Mac site.  Why it has to overwrite files that have different names for sites that have been published from a different computer is beyond me?

That whole metaphor of tying you to one computer for your web work just doesn't make sense in this day of people having desktops and laptops. 

When I got iLife 08, I created a nice test blog on my computer in Roanoke, Virginia and published it to .Mac.  Nearly eighty people had a look at it from a link in a previous Applepeels.

The url, which was "http://web.mac.com/dsobotta/Ocracoke_Waves/Blog/Blog.html," gave me some hope that maybe iWeb would be smart enough not to overwrite files with different names.  Based on previous versions I suspected that I would not be so lucky.  I was right.

When I published a new site with a different name from another computer, it overwrote the first set of files.  I finally found the new url which was http://web.mac.com/dsobotta/Carteret_County,_NC/Blog/Blog.html .  It of course works while you can only see the old one first page through a screen capture that I did.

Of course I can go back and republish from the other computer and overwrite these files.   There should be a better way.

Why Apple can't let multiple computers create multiple sites easily is beyond me?

I have found instructions from a third party about how to work on multiple sites and multiple computers but I haven't tried them yet.

I have also had a few problems with files not being quite the same when I publish to a folder and upload to one of my non .Mac sites.

I had to do some copying and pasting in Dreamweaver to get my Ocracoke Waves blog on my site looking like the one which I just destroyed on .Mac.

As usual there are some really good things about the new software from Apple.  There are also some things which would lead you to question if Apple actually understands how people really take advantage of the web even in developing for the web.

When I work on a site with Dreamweaver, it downloads everything I need to change a site to the second computer that I might be using.  I don't have to worry about having the right files.

Apple isn't the only company guilty of this, but I think we have a right to expect more of the Apple mother ship when they have taken this long to redesign a product.

iWeb doesn't even ask me if I want to give it permission to overwrite files that aren't even named the same. 

That is pretty un-Apple in my book.

Comments

[Alex Patsay]

correction: "About a week later in NC, I installed iLive 08" - iLiFe

[ocracokewaves]

Thanks

[Jay]

I'm not crazy about iWeb for other reasons (haven't played with the iLife '08 version yet). So how does one go about updating the same site from multiple client computers and keeping them all in sync? Is there any software that does this that isn't fully server side? To be certain, I can log into MT from anywhere and pick up where I left off. MT also runs fully on my server.

To do this with iWeb, iWeb would have to download your site each time, let you play with a copy in the local sandbox and then upload the finished product. That could be done using "rsync" to minimize the up/down time and the server copy would have to be the "authoritative" one in a multi-client scenario. Still, I can see ways that this would get ugly quickly. Point is, iWeb is designed for a single user on a single computer to create a web page in point and click fashion. Nothing fancier.

Transmit's Coda might be a better package for what you want to do. I'm not sure if it support multiple clients but I'm betting they'll be more responsive to the suggestion than Apple will.