How to Improve iPhoto

We take a lot of digital photos. While some are for pleasure, the majority of our pics are for business -- the business of blogging, selling, and cat rescuing.

Being bloggers, we end up using a lot of our own photos in posts. Some of us have set up macros and Automator scripts to resize photos automatically, saving us a lot of time, but we wish things were even more automated. More precisely when it comes to uploading photos onto Craigslist and eBay. For a while now, I've had an idea on how to improve iPhoto and last week, during a meeting with Apple where they showed us their new iMac, MacBook, and Magic Mouse (review coming soon!) I pitched them my idea and, surprisingly, the PR folk loved it and promised to bring it up the Apple flagpole. Here's the scoop…

When I'm not taking photos of stuff to blog about, I'm taking photos of junk I want to get rid of (living in a studio forces you to have a critical eye). I end up posting a lot on Craigslist and eBay. Craigslist even more than the latter due to all the cat rescue I do. Every day I post ads to the free classifieds site, and every week I'm refreshing ads that haven't gotten a response (or the response I was looking for). This requires a lot of photo resizing and uploading, which got me thinking, what if iLife was upgraded so that iPhoto included shortcuts to Craigslist and eBay?

Similar to its already fabulous Facebook and Flickr shortcuts, these classifieds' buttons would allow you to select photos you want to add to a listing and would automatically resize and upload the photos to a new posting. All you would have to do is provide the listing's text. It would shave some time off posting, which may get more people to stop procrastinating and actually list their old Hall & Oates collection.

Who knows if Apple will actually implement this in their next iLife upgrade -- the folks at Apple could have just been humoring me -- but if it does, we expect Steve Jobs to change his allegiance from Gizmodo to Unplggd, thank you very much.

How would you improve iPhoto?

Comments (6)

The thing I don't get about the Flickr integration is that it doesn't post to Flickr, but share with Flickr. It's a no brainer for someone just setting up an account, but if you end up with two different systems for managing iPhoto and Flickr, it's a huge pain.

the way i improved iPhoto? I stopped using it and went to Aperture. So much better. I can do 90% of my editing right in the program without having to go to photoshop or anything like that. There are a few quirks that make me angry, but every piece of software is like that. I have a plug in for flickr in aperture too. You just click the button and it uploads to your account. Easy Peasy. Same with facebook, hit a button and it uploads.

I can see the integration in iphoto to be a big help though. Like really easy integration. Ebay would be amazing

due to a "glitch" in iphoto, i lost years of pictures.

thats pretty much the last time i ever opened that program. good riddance.

jmorey, aperture is awesome for sorting and you can even build scripts in it to do anything you want for output, but for the novice or even most computer literate it might be too much, But it is a heck of alot faster.

mfpants, backup

it was my first imac, and my first venture into apple territory, the loss of photos happened within a month of me using my mac (which also died within 15 months). neither the genius's nor online support could help retrieve the data.

lesson learned.

I would improve iPhoto by making sure it does not end up including every silly suggestion from every customer. The great thing about Apple products is not so much what's included but what isn't. We don't need support for every possible place a photo could be hosted. Maybe just an API that allows third parties to extend the functionality. Adding complexity to software just makes it more unstable and less useful.

@ThrustinJ iPhoto 9 DOES post the photo to flickr. That is how I get the bulk of my photos into flickr.