Proprietary elegance good enough? (Was: Re: OT: notebook shopping)

[Kurt Granroth]

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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