iLife 08: On the Web Darkly

I shoot RAW with my DSLRs and fuss endlessly with the files in Aperture. Since most of the Occasion shots are taken with a Canon Powershot SD 550, iPhoto is where the Holiday and Birthday jpegs live.

When I need to do a Professional looking and quick web site for a Commercial client I use the Web Template feature in Aperture. It is flexible enough, easy to use and most importantly, it is quick. For WideWorldPictures, my personal portfolio site, I’ve long used GoLive. Adobe is famous for it’s high prices and complete indifference to it’s customers. I’m looking to replace GoLive with something not made by Adobe.

I’m also trying not to (re) learn HTML and CSS and start something from scratch. I’d like a dynamic solution but I’m too cheap purchase one. Not incidentally, I have more than enough to do as a photographer so anything that even threatens to save me some time seems worth a try.

With iLife ’08, the latest version of iPhoto has been coupled Apples .mac web service to produce what Apple calls a “.mac Web Gallery.” Web Gallery is a chock full ‘o AJAX with some Flash web application that is a very nice place to hoist portfolios. Additionally, .mac now allows personal URL’s rather than the former www.mac.com/yourmembernamegoeshere/content addressing scheme. All this is most easily hoisted onto the web using yet another iLife ’08 app, iWeb.

I’ll write more about the .mac Web Gallery web application in the near future. Now I need to complain.

Aperture 1.5x is fairly well integrated into the iLife suite. You can basically see your selected Aperture projects, folders and the like using iPhoto and File > Open Aperture Library. This makes iPhoto / iWeb a one stop web content generating tool that can author both traditional HTML web pages along with the new Web Galleries.

Well, almost.

Using iPhoto / iWeb and .mac together with the standard iWeb Photo page template makes a muddy mess of images. Everything previews fine on the desktop, but something goes terribly wrong by the time the images arrive on .mac. It’s either no or poor color management or worse. Aperture output onto .mac looks fine so it would not appear to be only a .mac problem but something that iWeb is doing prior to sending content up to .mac.

In any case, until this gets sorted out, don’t bother using iWeb ’08 to post photos onto .mac. Your images deserve better. I received my copy of iLife ’08 in early August. Five weeks and counting. This is long past needing to be fixed.