Editor's Blog: Eugene's iView v. iPhoto Cage Fight
Posted 05/08/2007 at 2:41pm
| by Eugene "Snaps" Robinson

It’s a brand new world. In the old world I’d dreamed of maybe affording a Hasselblad, a super expensive top-viewing Swedish camera. My reasons for doing this had much more to do with what happens when you take photos than the fact that it was some hoity-toity Euro-piece of fine arts machinery. I was convinced that the motion made when you use a traditional camera, the raising of the arms and pointing of the camera is so familiar and familiarly off-putting that it significantly, though sublimely, changes your photos because it changes at least the humans you’re photographing. But with a top-view camera, which is typically held at your abdomen, you can frame and shoot all day long without tipping your hand to those who might only be casually aware about what it is you’re doing.
Never worked up the scratch for the Hasselblad but that was the old world and in the NEW world digital cameras sort of offer the same sort of freedom from the arms-to-the-face thing what with their large viewfinders on the camera back. Well, that and on my Pentax Optio S there’s a feature that let’s me take like a photo a second so I can press the button once and go gallivanting like some sort of investigative journalist all around places I shouldn’t be – war zones, riots, discos – photographing people in less than desirable states. Like Florida. Which is what I call “a joke."
So, in short: problem solved.
Now instead of spending valuable weekend time in dark rooms developing fuzzy photographs of things, I can download 976 photos of street parties in South Beach on to my PowerBook G4…and then wonder why my computer’s so slow. Enter a man we call IVAN the Spaniard: he claims it’s slow because iPhoto is a memory hog and I should move on over to iView MediaPro. Since trusting Spaniards named Ivan seems as advisable as trusting Swissmen named Manuel, I decided to do a cross comparison. Because I have oodles of time for things like cross comparisons, or anything even remotely approaching an Apple v. Microsoft referendum which, let's face it this might be understood as since Apple makes the one and Microsoft makes the other.
But, trepidation aside, I loaded up 100 of my blurry photos in both iView and iPhoto with my objective being to create album sets and adjustments, filter some by keywords, and maybe work them into a slide show of some kind. Yes, iView and iPhoto…iJust can’t stand the suspense and so it goes that while iPhoto only lets you add keywords to photos, the iView lets you add annotations, captions, custom fields AND keywords. There’s also, valuable after a sudden data loss in iPhoto, a backup feature in iView. iView also lets you save more than just pics – audio formats, animation stuff, html. And while iPhoto is maybe a SKOSH easier to use (I mean they’re pushing iView MediaPro for PROS, you know), iView wasn’t that hard to figure out and was a little faster than what I had been used to with iPhoto. So iView it was/will be, my utter and total shock notwithstanding. That would be utter and total shock at its $200 price tag. Which means I'll be using free downloads of this as long as I can before they expire.
And so, yup, I felt pretty proud of myself. Thousands of photos of shoes, light poles, and bartenders whose names I don’t remember. All nicely catalogued and ready for photo albuming in a Shoes, Light Poles and Bartenders Whose Names I Don’t Remember album. Yeah, it just doesn’t get much better than this.