Over here, Peter Nixey writes a monologue to Apple about what he'd like to see in iPhoto or some replacement. One thing Peter suggests is to get rid of individual "Camera Rolls" for devices and just have one universal camera roll which replaces the current implementation of Photo Streams. There is a problem with this idea that I would like to share with you. It starts with me acquiring a Nikon D7000.
So there I am, on holiday in another town at the top end of Australia. I have a day to myself because the other half has gone on camp with her mother and sisters, so I go shopping. I've been lusting after a D7000 for about a year, and of course my wanderings happen to take me into a camera store. They have the D7000 there, and of course I buy it. Then off I go into the wilderness of Brisbane to take photos and see how bad a photographer I can be (I'm just "Guy With Camera" quality at this stage). By the time I get home I have about 200 dodgy photos.
Once I got home, I opened up my MacBook Air, plugged in the card reader and started sucking photos off the SD card from the camera. Then I started playing with ratings, rejections, keywords, yadda yadda. It wasn't until about three hours later that I realised my MacBook Air was tethered to my iPhone, and I decided I should use the local WiFi instead. Thought nothing of it at that point.
I finished up with my iPhoto shenanigans and headed off to the couch to web surf, read my RSS feeds (in Reeder, of course), and somewhere along the way I got to talking to my host about the things I was using my iPad for. Along the way I opened up iPhoto on the iPad, and while I was talking about iPhoto I noticed my recent photos were appearing. It took a few moments for me to realise what was going on: the iPad was syncing up the Photostream from iCloud.
Heart in my mouth, I headed off to my phone provider's web site and checked my account: out of my 2GB quota for the month I had already used 1.8GB in one day.
At this point in time, I do not use Photostream because it's far too dangerous.
If you read Peter's article, and extrapolate from my iPhoto Library being "in the cloud" to being "on my big desktop computer at home", then most of what Peter says is absolutely right: I would love to have access to the iPhoto Library (or Aperture Library as the case may be) from my iPad and iPhone so that I can mess about with my photos while I'm lounging on the couch, or in deep thought in the reading room. Heck, just access to the Photostream or Camera Roll so I can tag with keywords and give a live/die appraisal of the photos before settling in for a serious rating and tagging session later, would be awesome.
Having a means to dump the contents of my D7000 into that same photo stream without having to fire up Aperture would also be awesome! This can't go via my iPad, since I use that for my music collection and as a result the iPad has very little free space compared with the 16GB of raw (NEF format) images from the D7000. At present I end up using Autoimporter to suck the images off the SD cards into a folder on the MacBook Air's SSD, then I plug in the portable drive with the Aperture library, import the photos into the library, then clear the images off the SSD. I would love a way to automatically sync these Aperture libraries with the iMac once I get back home.
But interacting with my music or photo libraries in the cloud while my devices are using 3G? No way, José!
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