I’m using Apple’s iPhoto on my PowerBook to manage the thousands of travel pictures. Lately the application has become very slow and unstable, and I was already preparing mentally to switch to F-Spot. Because of this, I was happy to hear that the new iPhoto 6 supports managing over 250k photos in the archive.

The new Photocasting features also sounded interesting, but I was wondering why Apple invented their own photo-sharing features instead of implementing the Pheed syntax.

Here’s what I wrote to Apple iPhoto feedback:

First of all, it is great news that the new iPhoto can manage large photo archives. My older installation croaked to halt everytime when using my 10k travel photos accumulated over the last year.

For that reason alone I’m eagerly waiting for the new iLife to hit the stores here in Finland.

However, the Photocasting features sound also very interesting. I’m publishing my pictures to my own website instead of .Mac using the Photon plugin, and obviously publishing Photocast feeds from there would be a nice way to help my friends and family watch the pictures.

My gallery already implemented a Photocasting standard: Pheed (http://www.pheed.com/pheed/) and so I was happy to hear of iPhoto’s Photocasting support.

However, it seems that instead of following the RSS standard and its already available extensions you’ve created your own pseudo-standard for these things.

I wonder if this is just due to early development status of the project, or of it will be a permanent state of “embrace and extend”.

We’ll have to see what happens with this one. Apple already fixed the iTunes privacy issue, and as this RSS problem is also gathering attention, they might fix it too.

Updated 18:24: Seems that Photon still works with iPhoto 6.