Reviews

Evaluating .Mac and iPhoto ‘08

One of the killer features of iPhoto ‘08 is the improved support for Web Galleries on Apples .Mac service. The Galleries produced by iPhoto are extremely slick and support the ’skimming’ feature of iPhoto for Web browser users as well as a number of different views and the ability to dynamically adjust the size of the thumbnails displayed on screen. In addition when publishing photos to the Web gallery it is possible to specify a range of permissions including whether the photos are public or restricted to a number of users and whether users can download or upload photos or send in photos to the gallery by email.

The upload feature is the one that is perhaps the most unique to this service. When a new photo is uploaded to a gallery it is automatically synchronised back into iPhoto on the gallery owners Mac next time the Mac is connected to the Internet. This happens regardless of what operating system the person sending the photos to the gallery is using making this the ideal way for Mac and Windows users to collaborate on photo libraries ( well at least from the Mac perspective ).

What some new iLife ‘08 users may not realise about the .Mac service, especially those like myself who had an original account when they purchased their Macs which subsequently expired, is that you can sign up for a 60 day free trial. The trial is limited to 50Mb of disk space rather that the 10Gb that full subscribers are allocated, however for trying out the new facilities this should be more than enough.

If you haven’t yet seen the .Mac galleries you can check out mine here

Enjoy.