do you know how to get iphoto to read vista tagged files?

thanks (please email me if so)

Yeah, I've got an iPhoto Library Manager license and I've also donated a little to Rick Neil for the freeware iPhoto Buddy, which does a similar thing. They're both good products, and have been very useful when merging libraries.

However, I'm one of those slightly obsessive types who wants all my photos tagged, searchable and accessible from a single window :-)

Rather than breaking up the library into sub-libraries, I've gone through and deleted some of the more egregiously useless shots. I've got a bad habit of taking a number of shots on continuous drive, picking the best, and then completely failing to ditch the old shots.

Thing is, this stuff is unnecessary. Apple have a bad habit of failing to optimise these apps for scalability, and also targetting the higher end of their hardware range, rather than catering for us poor bozos still using G4 iBooks, which admittedly is not surprising for a hardware company like Apple. iTunes is pretty crappy at handling large libraries, and as I understand it, starts slowing down non-linearly when you get to the tens and hundreds of thousands of tracks. I'm only on about 8000 tracks and it's noticeably slow in starting up.

I think the great hope is that the Core Data API -- which iTunes and iPhoto predate -- will give them scalability for these kinds of app. It can use SQLite databases, along with XML and binary formats. Tiger's Mail.app already uses SQLite for the main mail index, although I'm not sure whether it's using Core Data or using SQLite directly. They haven't had many qualms about totally replacing the data/filing mechanisms for iPhoto and iTunes in the past, so I'm hoping they'll reengineer around Core Data as well. If they'd then add a MySQL or PostgreSQL backend for Core Data, you could then run iPhoto and iTunes on a database cluster... mmm...

With the EXIF munging, it's fairly annoying, as I know it wouldn't be hard to implement. It might even be practical to do as a plugin. Unfortunately, iPhoto is completely undocumented as far as I can tell and my attention span just doesn't go far enough to figure it out!

Get iPhoto Library Manager! Free download by Brian Webster. I don't know why Apple doesn't just buy him out and incorporate this feature? It makes a world of difference.

As far as iPhoto EXIF info goes- Apple should have addressed this issue instead of creating Aperture. iPhoto PRO would have been a much simpler, faster product but they dropped the ball.