iPhoto is dying.
That much is clear. iPhoto 11's launch bug problems followed the pattern of the past decade. Unlike past releases though, iPhoto 11 lost important capabilities -- just like iMovie and Final Cut Pro X regressed from prior versions.
That's bad, but what's worse is that, after seven years of sort-of trying, Aperture is still not an adequate iPhoto replacement.
Bad on bad news, but the real sign of a dying platform is the echoing silence. When users stop complaining, a software platform is dead.
Fortunately I had planned from this the very beginning. I knew, nine years ago, I was taking a big risk putting my photos and data into an Apple product. Even then Apple had a reputation -- it didn't worry much about customer data. I figured Apple might abandon iPhoto, but I also figured the Mac community would come up with a migration solution.
I was wrong. There's no migration to Lightroom, there is no exit from iPhoto that preserves data.
Where did I go wrong? I missed this ...
Of funerals, digital photos and impermanence — Tech News and Analysis
... Apps like Instagram and Path, both of which I love, actually make this problem worse instead of better in some ways. They are great for sharing quick snapshots of a place you are visiting or someone you are with or what you are eating — and you can share those easily to Flickr and Facebook and Tumblr and lots of other platforms (more than 26 photos are uploaded to Instagram every second). But do you want to save all of these for a lifetime, along with the ones you took of your new baby or your sister’s wedding? Probably not. So again, there is a filtering problem....
I didn't imagine that geeks would basically give up; overwhelmed by rapidly changing technologies. I didn't anticipate that the 'prosumer' computer platforms would die instead of reforming. I didn't imagine that OS X would go into maintenance mode. I didn't imagine a technology regression of this magnitude.
I expected rough waters, I didn't expect whitewater.
See also:
- iPhoto 9.2.1 to Aperture 3.2.1 - it doesn't actually work 1/2012
- Migration of metadata from Aperture to iPhoto and Google's Picasa web albums 9/2011
- Stuck in Apple's photo management Limbo 5/2011
- Aperture Projects descriptions and iPhoto Event descriptions - what happens on iPhoto migration? 12/2010
- Gordon's Notes: Lessons in Software: Aperture 3 and iPhoto 11 10/2010
- iPhoto 11 and Aperture 3 - more bad news 10/2010
- Aperture keyword hierarchy does not support inheritance queries 2/2009
- Aperture 2: consolidating two iPhoto Libraries 2/2008
- iPhoto '08: don't embed metadata in JPEG originals 12/2007
- Aperture: can't import iPhoto Library 3/2006
- Aperture woes - and iPhoto 6 image export 4/2006
- Why are Apple products so risky? 1/2006
- Apple Aperture: iPhoto replacement? 10/2005
- iPhoto: A Potemkin Application? 12/2003 - shipped before it was ready.
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