January 11, 2006

You can't photocast a smart album in iPhoto 6

In retelling the events of my day to Kevin, I remembered something that I need to blog about. One of my more ingenious questions that I asked today was if you can photocast a smart album in iPhoto 6. When I asked the Apple representative this question, he had no idea if iPhoto 6 supported this feature or not.

This was actually a recurring theme today. Because most of the Apple employees working the booth learned about all of Apple's new products at the same time that I did -- during the keynote. So, they were basically learning as they went along.

So, I convinced the Apple guy to try it. We made a smart album that contained a subset of all of the photos on the demo machine, and sure enough, the photocast button was greyed-out.

We both agreed, however, that this would be a cool feature. Since photocasting already has seamless support for adding and removing photos from an album, coupling this with a smart album would be a no brainer. This would allow you to make an album of say, dog pictures, and photocast it. Then, whenever you bring new photos into iPhoto and tag them with the "dog" attribute (a process that still sucks in iPhoto 6, btw. Maybe they'll get robust tagging ala Flickr in 2007), it will automatically be shared in the photocast.

Look for Apple to tout this feature as one of the great new "innovations" in iPhoto 7, right around this time next year.

You heard it here first.

-Andy.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Posted by andyr at January 11, 2006 12:38 AM