iPhoto is an application. Not the OS. Tons of apps in Windows and Linux that work with similar abstractions as iPhoto. If you don't like the abstraction use another app. There are around 10-15 for photo management on the Mac, from big guns like Lightroom and Aperture to tons of lightweight image managers.

That said, what you write makes no sense. You might as well have written: "My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction PostgreSQL decided to enforce upon me" (I want my tables in plain CSV files, damnit!).

>This slowly cranked on until I ended up with basically OS-X as a window manager for a terminal emulator, browser, ViewNX and Apple Mail connected to GMail (which didn't work properly either and ended up just being done in a browser).

I fail to see how it "didn't work properly". Been using Gmail and Mail.app for 7 years. Any particular real-world problem?

>As iWork was shit and corrupted documents left right and centre

Never had that.

>Granted I could have used Office for Mac but it was the 2004 version which was a POS that relied on Rosetta.

Ever thought of upgrading it?

This is needless (and incorrect) semantics. An OS is just a collection of applications (perhaps the distinction you were trying to make was the kernel or "base OS"). As far as the end user is concerned, when they get a new Mac it comes with iPhoto, which is made by Apple, the same people that make the rest of the OS (unless they get the ONE configuration of the Mac Pro which is the only hardware that doesn't include it). More importantly, when they plug any photo taking device into their freshly opened Mac, iPhoto pops up until they find and explicitly turn off the preference to do that. To and end user (and even by many of the existing technical definitions of OS), iPhoto is part of the OS.

Same with my parents, every time I'm visiting they give me their camera to import the pictures. It would be godsent if iPhoto popped up in their face and asked for import and sorted photos for them.

We're all/most power users here, it's a factor of a gazillion times easier for us to opt-out of stuff like iPhoto, than it is for my mother to opt-in for it.

Incorrect in what parallel universe?

>An OS is just a collection of applications (perhaps the distinction you were trying to make was the kernel or "base OS").

Yes. OS X is just a collection of applications of which iPhoto is NOT one. IIRC, they don't even bundle iLife anymore (you're supposed to get it from the App Store) but that's beside the point.

>As far as the end user is concerned (...) To an end user (and even by many of the existing technical definitions of OS), iPhoto is part of the OS.

Are you some naive end user OR an HN commenter that CAN tell the different between OS X and iPhoto, and doesn't complain about the latter on a thread about the first?

iPhoto IS one. As I distinctly explained in my previous post, iPhoto comes installed on every every single Mac that Apple sells with the sole exception of the server configuration of the Mac Pro. Go to the Apple web page and click on any Mac and look at the "Built-in Apps" section, you will see iPhoto displayed right alongside "system" apps like Mac App Store, Mail, and Messages. iLife is just a marketing name. iTunes used to be part of iLife too. Now they're just apps, apps that 99.9% of people that purchase a Mac will find on their computers pre-installed when they open them. That was half my point: that iPhoto today is just about as much a part of a default installation of Mac OS X as any.

>Are you some naive end user OR an HN commenter that CAN tell the different between OS X and iPhoto, and doesn't complain about the latter on a thread about the first?

Now that we've gotten the fact that iPhoto will almost certainly be on my machine when I open it, it should be clear to you that it doesn't matter which of these I am. For better or worse, iPhoto is a part of the Mac experience. Drawing an imaginary line around a subset of applications and calling them "OS" or "not OS" does not take away from the fact that a bad iPhoto experience will understandably contribute to a bad Mac experience. As such, both by technical and laymen's understandings of OS, the critique is valid.

Edit: My mistake, iPhoto is included in the server one as well. So it turns out iPhoto comes installed on every single Mac.

However, reinstall MacOS, and you will notice it doesn't install iLife.

Similarly, most Windows computers seem to ship with that 30 day trial of MS Office these days; does that mean that 30 day trials of MS Office are part of Windows?

Sure, it's a non-part-of-the-core-OS, bundled for free, easily replaceable, with 10s of alternatives, peripheral to using a Mac, part of the Mac experience.

To return to our duck-ing topic, what does that have to do with OS X being bad or "not just working"?

If you had to bring up a bundled, non-essential, app to make your point of OS X not working well, then one has to conclude it works mighty fine overall.

And it's even worse than that: you haven't actually even made any point against iPhoto. Just that you don't like it's filesystem abstraction. Which is neither here, not there.

I believe you are well aware that you are being disingenuous by treating iPhoto as some sort of unrelated third party application that you have no idea why anyone would bring up out of be blue in a discussion about OS X. Who cares if its "non essential", most of the stuff in OS X is completely non-essential (ahem dashboard, photo booth, even mail considering most people use webmail).

This makes no sense. iPhoto stores your photos in a directory structure on your system. This directory is like any other. If you want to extract the photos from them you can. You can also just right-click on your photos from within iPhoto and extract them.

> After removing iPhoto, it was bearable.

What was bearable? Why didn't you try and fix the problem? I've been using iPhoto for almost 10 years, across ~6 different machines, and have never had any issues with it.

a) talking to the library from the command line - the mapping between the UI and the filesystem was completely abstract.

b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent.

c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at.

Bearable was removing iPhoto and installing Nikon ViewNX which came with my D70. This has no abstraction - the filesystem is the abstraction.

(I know how to access the source files BTW).

So... doing "find . -type f -name '*.jpg' -print" is outside of your capabilities?

> b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent.

What were you trying to do?

> c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at.

man mdls

No but doing that when iPhoto stores backups of your images is a pain in the arse.

b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent

Automator + Photoshop.

> c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at.

Yes but that doesn't deal with folders which aren't indexed. For example if you do an iPhoto import it can lag for a while before Spotlight catches up. Bang - synchronisation problem.

This shot me badly.

The whole solution is just bad.

In what way?

> Yes but that doesn't deal with folders which aren't indexed. For example if you do an iPhoto import it can lag for a while before Spotlight catches up. Bang - synchronisation problem.

Moving goalposts. First you said the metadata was opaque. It wasn't. Now you're saying there is lag.

What were you trying to do? I do a lot of photography, and while I am no means a pro -- or even a semi-pro -- I have done automator scripts against iPhoto with zero problems. You still haven't said what you were trying to accomplish.

The metadata is still not opaque (its not stored with the files making backup/restore hard) and it lags meaning its potentially somewhere between ok and useless at any point in time.

Watermark, thumbnail, rename, move to a directory outside iPhoto, run a gallery script. Hell.

I ended up with ViewNX which has no abstraction and a python script using PIL instead of automator. Neither of which leverage any advantage that OSX portrays. In fact I could do the same thing on any platform.

Who should have to go to a command line and run old school commands to find something they can clearly see otherwise using an app provided by the maker of the machine and OS?

I did the right click show in finder to find that directory for my photos and honestly could not determine how I would have gotten there in Finder starting at the top.

I really enjoy OS X but at times it can be downright annoying, annoying as in "If Microsoft makes doing "X" easy why is it so damn hard here"

Sometimes you just need to right-click View Package Contents to access the directory, and I'm sure that tiny fence solves many many support headaches for 99% of users.

That's pretty minor.

And it's not about how Macs just work, it's that you have apps for almost anything that actually work.