iPhoto

» see apple.com/iphoto as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i missed iphoto. it shipped on every mac and there were no macs in my house. the photo software i used through the iphoto years was a rotation of acdsee or irfanview, with whatever happened to come bundled with the camera. iphoto was the parallel-universe answer for the people who paid the apple tax, and from the windows side you heard about it secondhand when a coworker showed off a slideshow with ken burns pans on a powerbook.

steve jobs introduced iphoto on january 7, 2002 at macworld san francisco as part of the 'digital hub' strategy. itunes already covered the music side of that strategy and imovie covered video. iphoto was the missing photo piece, built on the assumption that everyone now had a digital camera and needed a place to dump the memory cards. it imported photos by drag and drop and could turn an album into a hardcover photo book that apple printed and shipped to your door. the iphoto years overlap exactly with the period when digital cameras went from enthusiast hardware to default phone behavior.

iphoto shipped as part of ilife from january 2003 onward, bundled on every new mac for the next twelve years. the last standalone version was 9.6.1, released march 19, 2015. apple announced the end at wwdc 2014, and the replacement photos app shipped april 8, 2015 with os x yosemite 10.10.3. the brand was retired then. the libraries were either migrated into photos or left to rot inside obsolete.iphoto packages on old hard drives.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

iphoto's actual function was to make digital photography feel manageable to people who were not interested in file systems. before it, the dominant pattern was a folder of img_0001.jpg files dumped from the camera and never opened again. iphoto's library model abstracted the files away. you saw thumbnails grouped by event and faces tags, while the underlying file system was hidden because most people did not want to think about it. that abstraction is the thing apple later ported to ios as the photos app on iphone, and the iphoto library model is the direct ancestor of how every phone now organizes pictures.

~ the day it died ~

by 2014 iphoto had become a slow program. libraries with thirty thousand photos took half a minute to open, and the cocoa framework underneath had aged into something apple did not want to keep maintaining. at wwdc 2014 apple announced that both iphoto and aperture would be retired in favor of a single photos app that shared a unified library with the iphone. the migration was promised to be lossless. it was not: faces data did not transfer cleanly, and books and cards were dropped along with most third-party plugins.

~ what it became ~

photos for os x is the direct inheritance, and through it the entire photos app on every iphone is the deeper one. the icloud photo library that now syncs across apple devices is the iphoto library scaled to the phone era. the brand iphoto is gone, along with the cardboard photo books that arrived in apple-branded shipping boxes. what survived is the assumption that photos belong inside an app that hides the files, which has become the default everywhere.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »