iPhoto 6 mini review

So I just got iPhoto 6 going today and I was playing around with it for a bit and I'm pretty happy with the upgrade. Here are the things that stood out so far:

- It's much faster than previous versions. There was a long painful step where it had to create thumbnails for a few thousand photos (took a while) but now it actually does scroll quickly through the library.

- I used to think iPhoto was slow but then I tried Aperture. Even on my 2Ghz G5 iMac with a Gb of RAM, Aperture would lag during scrolls, animations took a while, etc. I gave up on Aperture and am back on iPhoto now which feels super fast compared to both Aperture and earlier versions

- The photocasting out to .Mac is kind of pointless since I won't use that feature, but subscribing to photocasts is KILLER. You don't have to follow just .Mac photocasts, the app can read flickr RSS feeds natively. Here's a screenshot of my flickr friends feed in iPhoto. This sure beats using a reader like bloglines. I can already tell I'll be looking at more photocasts than listening to podcasts. It hink Apple's really onto something here.

- I noticed you can drag flickr photocast photos into your own albums though it doesn't seem to import them into your library. I could swear that shared iPhoto libraries over the network let you drag other people's photos to your library. It'd be cool if iPhoto could interpret settings on photos like say, Creative Commons licenses, and let you pull down images from Flickr to your library based on the license, and maybe if people had a share-alike license you could edit them in your library and repost to flickr with the license info intact (along with a pointer to the original on flickr). At the moment, you can't do anything with flickr photos in the photo editor.

- I imported several thousand old photos from my 2002-2004 iPhoto backups as well as hundreds of recent photos from Aperture and it went pretty quickly. Rebuilding all those thumbnails took a while, but I now have over 11,000 images in iPhoto and it's still fast.

Overall, I haven't found any problems yet, though I'm still looking for a flickr export plugin that works with iPhoto 6.