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It Just Works, NOT! Apple Fail.

This article is more than 10 years old.

The subject at hand here highlights all the ways that Apple’s method — simple, direct, limited choice, intuitive — can blow up in the owner’s face.

Now, I’ve been relatively quiet about this for several years, but a recent incident sent me over the top.  It has to do with photo handling in the Apple world, both OS X and iOS, and how broken it is.

The proximal incident occurred when, recently, I opened a photo album on my iPhone called “Swiss Honeymoon” and found in it, along with pictures of my current wife, pictures of my former wife.  It just works.  Ha!

Another album called “Euro Tour” has pictures of Japan in it.

If this were just the first time I noticed these sorts of anomalies, I would be down to the Apple store to have a genius look the thing over.  But I’ve already been to the Apple Store.  Twice.  With heavy iMac and iPhone in tow.  And sat down with the genii for long periods, during which we marveled that such a thing could be happening.

And we tried rebuilding this and that, all to no avail.

So, let’s take it from the top.  First of all, a little known or appreciated fact in the tech world is that Microsoft — yes, Microsoft —is much better at handling photos than Apple.  Microsoft has had all sorts of trouble convincing people of this fact, and it’s not hard to understand why.  If a drooling monster with something green stuck between its teeth came over and sat down next to you to try to convince you that it’s really a very good chess player, you would probably never verify this assertion because you would be fleeing its overpowering odor as fast as possible.

But nonetheless.  Aside from fancy ways that Microsoft uses photos in tiles in Windows 8, in search results on Bing, and in megaphoto stitches in SkyDrive, the company just adheres to one simple concept that gives the user control over his or her pix: you can put your photos in whatever folders you want.

So, of course, this structure suits my penchant for knowing where things are.  Under My Pictures or Pictures (both, really, because I have the directory synced on multiple machines), I have Family, and under that, Vacations, and under that, the most recent one to Upstate New York, and in that, all the photos from that trip in chronological order.  How simple!

Apple, on the other hand, has this iron-clad directory in the iPhoto Library.  Once you put your pictures in, that’s their order forever and ever.  A huge flat file of all your stuff.  Which you can view at various scales but not change.  Recent updates try to use “Events” as a way to let intelligent software break the directory into chunks that correspond to likely single, well, events.  But you can imagine how well that works.  Nothing but corned beef hash at the Events level!

Of course, you can use Albums to create the coherent groupings that you want.  But that can get tricky as your Library gets large.  And it’s cumbersome to create Albums every time you upload photos.

But, as Dr. Seuss would say, “That is not all, oh no!  That is not all!”

The real hashing comes when you try to sync iPhoto with the iPhone.  That’s when you get the weird honeymoon folder with more than one wife in it.  Or the picture of the Buddha at Nara in the middle of the series on the Alps.

The baffled genii could not figure out what was happening.  The Mac at least had all the photos, never mind the order.  And it was some number like 1,482.  The iPhone had only 1,156.  And I’m, like, where are the others?  The guy fiddled with it for three-quarters of an hour (three genius appointment slots) and got the number on the phone to rise to 1,408.  He was, like, well, at least that’s better.

And I’m, like, no!  That is not better!  If there’s not a one-to-one correspondence between the two, then something is hosed, and I can’t rely on the program (good thing my real photo library is in Windows).

We worked on various levels of reset until we reached one where the genius made me do it (because it could destroy all my data), all for naught.

My own sense is that photo handling was an afterthought for Apple, which was concerned with music when it created iTunes.  iPhoto is sort of a bolt on.  Between iCloud, iOS, OS X, iPhoto, and iTunes, something is getting lost in the shuffle.  And no application of genius seems to make a difference.

For now, I’ll stick with Microsoft on this one.

Twitter: RogerKay