Ryan Estrellado

Photo by Thomas Hawk

Whether you are a first generation iPhone user making an upgrade or a recent convert readying the funds for a first-time purchase, gathering useful information about the recently announced 3G iPhone requires wading through an ocean of blogs, rumor sites, and tech punditry in search of the facts.  Ultimately, the safest advice would be to wait until the release of the 3G iPhone in July and let the early adopters review the phone based on actual experience, but where would the fun be in that?

Below is a collection of interesting links to help answer your 3G iPhone questions, or at the very least keep you busy while you wait.

• Apple’s Official iPhone Page
• iPhone 3G: The Details You Never Wanted to Know
• 5 Reasons to Buy the Apple iPhone 3G
• Thomas Hawk on the Upgrade to 3G
• ZDNet Blog Post on What’s Missing in the New iPhone
• News Story on Apple’s and AT&T’s Efforts at Preventing the Unlocking of the 3G iPhone
• Investment Strategies for iPhone Customers

A common problem that emerges for digital shutter bugs is photo organization and data management.  Bringing home 3,000 photos from a family trip and wanting to have them stored and accessible on multiple computers can lead to a lack of control over the media and even some risk of data loss as you move files back and forth.

Specifically, my own problem was not having a way to manage two Macs with active iPhoto libraries and 8,000 photos.  To complicate things, the 8,000 photos were spread across the two Macs with each computer sharing an unknown quantity of duplicates and some degree of tagging and editing.  My goal was to move all of the photos to my desktop computer, reduce or eliminate duplicates, and retain all of the metadata.

Fat Cat Software’s iPhoto Library Manager has generated some buzz over it’s effectiveness to wrangle unruly photos across multiple library files, so I took it for a spin.

Here’s the set up I used to try this out:

• Dual G5 Power Mac
• Intel Core Duo Macbook
• Mac OS X 10.5.2
• iPhoto Library Manager 3.4 (purchased version - $19.95)

I purchased and installed the software on my Power Mac.  Once it was set up, the application was able to find both my Power Mac’s iPhoto library as well as my Macbook’s over my home network.  From there I was able to bring all of the photos from my Macbook’s library over to my Power Mac’s library with all the metadata intact.  As it imported the 3,000 photos from my laptop, it identified potential duplicates and prompted me to make a decision about whether or not to import.

As I reviewed my freshly imported photos on my Power Mac, I noticed that there were some duplicates that were missed by the application, but I found myself unable to complain considering that I thought the job at hand would be far more frustrating than it actually was.

This is only the tip of the iceberg for what iPhoto Library Manager is able to do.  Other features include splitting large libraries into smaller ones, syncing photos from multiple libraries with your iPod, and the ability to allow multiple users of a computer to share the same library on one machine.  Feel free to comment here on your experience using any of the other features.

You can read more about the features of both the free and purchased version at Fat Cat Software’s website:

Fat Cat Software

You can read other reviews of this application here:

Macworld Review

Apple Matters Review

The Canon G9 Series is a group of posts that discuss digital photography techniques and their application on the Canon G9. Feedback, especially from new and veteran G9 users, is welcome.

I feel obligated to qualify this series by stating that I consider myself a novice digital photographer with an interest in improving my technical knowledge. I don’t take pictures for a living nor do I have any formal training in photography. Most of my pictures are of family, friends, or other subjects I find interesting in my day to day life and work. Given my limited photography skill set, my approach is to shoot often and then cross my fingers that something memorable will be caught in the process. I’m very much a casual shooter, but I suspect (often to my wife’s annoyance) that I spend slightly more time than your average camera-toter trying to get the details correct to produce an attractive photo.

So why make the series about the Canon G9? Given the environment I choose to feed my photo habit, the Canon G9 offers the convenience of a point and shoot camera and at the same time many of the features and manual controls found on a digital SLR. In other words, I can indulge my interest in the technical details without needing to change lenses while trying to keep my one year-old out of the camera bag.

With that said, here are the goals of this series:

1. To post internet articles about digital photography techniques I’ve found useful
2. To discuss my experience with the techniques on the Canon G9
3. To allow for some discussion and opportunities for more feedback that I and others can learn from

photo by 96dpi