Andy Chase

I finally got my hands on iLife '04 - I haven't anticipated a piece of software as eagerly as I have GarageBand in as long as I can remember, and the upgrades to iPhoto were all welcome - but unbelievably, a useful feature has been removed from iPhoto in this upgrade.

When I jumped into iPhoto 4 (If it's iPhoto 4, why does the documentation refer to 'What's new in iPhoto 3?') and began playing with smart albums, one of the first things I wanted to do was look up a few images by title to which I haven't yet assigned keywords. Search by title was a feature that was previously somewhat clumsily implemented on the Keyword window. (In iPhoto 2, it's an unlabeled text box with a 'Search' button next to it underneath your list of keywords)

The feature is inexplicably gone in iPhoto 4... what was Apple thinking? The marginal 'Search by Title' functionality in iPhoto 2 was rough, but it was useful, dammit! Keywords are only useful as ways to designate loose groupings of photos; by season, or location, or the person or pet in the photo, et cetera... I don't want to create a keyword to describe every single photo in my library individually... otherwise I'd have an unsortable list of 500+ keywords. Describing individual photos is the logical place for titles to step in! Why in the world would this functionality be removed, even if it couldn't be improved upon from the previous version?

The only way to search photos now is by keyword, which renders the title and comment fields pretty much useless within iPhoto. I'm glad I've been dabbling with iPhoto's scriptable features lately, because it looks like I'm going to have to implement 'Search by title' myself. I'm not quite as pissed as I would be if that option weren't available to me, but I just find it mind-boggling that something as elemental as searching by photo title would have been removed in an upgrade.