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Yes, we're enthusiastic about iPhoto, even without having used it. But we think you'll find the following comments from someone who knows what she's talking about very useful, especially if you already have a good deal of experience with digital photos. There are a considerable number of issues, as it turns out, including frequent crashes. Surely this is to be expected from new software, but everyone should be informed.

Our correspondent's first suggestion is an especially good one. The official stuff is all laid out in the iPhoto section at Apple.com, but you'll really learn a lot from the iPhoto discussion page. Just go to the Support section and hunt for "discussions." [One thing we learned was that our older model SanDisk Imagemate Compact Flash reader (USB, model # SDDR-05) won't work with iPhoto because there is no OS X driver available. The latest model Imagemate will work, however, and it only costs about 25 bucks.]

"As a digital photo enthusiast, I strongly recommend that you read the discussion page at Apple about iPhoto. There you'll get a great overview of the pluses and minuses of this app. (I've already downloaded and played with it on my new iBook.)

While it has great promise, iPhoto has is definitely a v.1 app and has a ways to go before it's as nice and polished as, say, iTunes.

For example, if you've already named and organized your photo files, iPhoto will frustrate the heck out of you on import. All your photos are DUPLICATED and given arcane numbers -- and if you don't import folder by folder they all get dumped into one "roll." This is hardly user-friendly stuff. Create a new album, and sort photos into it. Look at how it's represented in the library... it's a human-unreadable string of numbers.

Keywording is limited to 14 customizable buttons. You can comment images but you can't search on the comments... and so on.

iPhoto has basic tools to crop and remove red-eye... everything else needs to be done in an external image editor.

iPhoto exports images in .jpg format by default, and uses it's own arcane naming scheme. "What the heck was that image supposed to be again?" Simply rotating an image and exporting it produces a lossy result.

There's no easy way to move the iPhoto library without using the Command Line -- so if that gives you the heebie jeebies, you'd better have a HUGE amount of space on your internal hard drive. (One smart thing iPhoto does in leave your original image untouched when it does its basic editing stuff, so you can always revert. But disk space gets gobbled.)

There's no easy way to burn your iPhoto library to CD, or to make a CD portfolio or slide show.

And on and on.

This is not to diss iPhoto. But it's definitely much more appropriate for the COMPLETELY clueless first time digital camera user, than the enthusiast who's been doing it for awhile.

My hope and expectation is that Apple will move swiftly to address these and many other issues with iPhoto."

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