I’ve been using Lightroom for awhile now and I have always been impressed with its speed. But it has been a little slow lately because of the number of pictures on my harddrive (around 6200)! And more than half of those are raw files, which means they’re bigger and they take much more space. Not to mention bogging down memory. Although in the beginning I was jumping back and forth betweeen Lightroom and Aperture. I really liked Aperture a lot and it had plenty of features that Lightroom could not provide. However, I was after speed and Aperture was just a complete turtle compared to Lightroom. I loved the editing functions of Aperture but it would take forever to do such things. In the end, I chose Lightroom as my main app.But now, since all my photo files are in an external harddrive – the non-usb-powered one (the ones you have to plug in an actual socket)- my mobility is somewhat limited. But since I have two USB-powered external harddrives, I decided to transfer some of my photos to one of them and use it as my “ultra-mobile-photostation-drive”. But using Lightroom is out of the question since I didn’t want to have two libraries of the same thing. I just wanted one for mobile pixel peeping. Aperture was too slow for me. And so I tried iPhoto 08. To say the least… I was amazed!

iPhoto 08 was extremely fast. It was even faster the Lightroom! The previous version of iPhoto was an abomination. It was horrible! I was even tempted to install Windows Vista on my MacBook (via BootCamp) just to have Picasa – which is a very excellent Photo browser for Windows. Google, for some reason, refuse to come out with Picasa for the Mac. Their promises are long overdue. I’m just glad Apple decided to listen and step it up a notch with the new version of iPhoto.

There are a few things that iPhoto needs though. One of them being, the ability to show EXIF data on photos. This is a must for photographers! (Listen Apple) Also, the editing features are somewhat lacking. Granted, it’s not a professional app and that I have Photoshop CS3 anyways, but I would love to see more editing functions than the standard adjustments. Nevertheless, this version was lightyears ahead of the previous one.

I am now contemplating on making iPhoto 08 my main app instead of Lightroom. However, the lack of EXIF functionalities within iPhoto leaves much to be desired. I do recommend this one to everyone who owns a Mac. By-the-way, you have to buy iLife 08 to get this app. You can’t buy just one.

UPDATE:
I was wrong about iPhoto not having any EXIF data.  If you press command-i, it will give you information on the photos.

In an effort to save space on my server (until I save enough money for a bigger one), I’m uploading videos to YouTube to be shown here…

Here is the slideshow I made for a family friend. Again, the quality isn’t that great since it’s thru YouTube. But no complaints here… it’s free!