Re: Proprietary elegance good enough? (Was: Re: OT: notebook…

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Author: Kurt Granroth
Date:  
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: Re: Proprietary elegance good enough? (Was: Re: OT: notebook shopping)
Chris Gehlker wrote:
> On Apr 25, 2008, at 10:36 PM, Kurt Granroth wrote:
>
>> But it [the iLife suite] does so in a completely and totally locked
>> down fashion. All files are sucked in, converted to the iLife
>> formats, and good luck ever trying to get them out again.
>
> I don't understand what you mean here. I haven't used iLife that much
> but i was able to export pictures from iPhoto in TIFF or JPEG and
> Music from Garage Band as MIDI.


As one-offs, yes. iPhoto, in fact, is even better than digikam for
exporting select photos from an album into a directory without having to
create a web album or some other contrivance. iMovie exports to quite a
few formats as well.

What I'm referring to is the original files. In iPhoto, for instance,
good luck trying to share the original pictures in an album with another
photo manager. It keeps the files in an odd directory ordering and
orders it through a proprietary database file. iTunes is the same with
their iTunes Library files. If you randomly add a file into directory
tree of either app, they will *not* recognize that it's new and add it
to their library. This is only done via their official import methods.
I've found that it's easier to completely 'nuke' my iPhoto albums
whenever I add new photos or videos (since I do it over a shared drive
via another application) than to import each one at a time.

Mind you, they have gotten a lot better in recent years. You can
actually have multiple libraries now and even tell each not to move the
original files (thus preserving whatever rational order you may have for
the originals). Sharing the originals is now far easier than it used to
be... still a pain, but easier.

Still not good enough, IMO.

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