I recently caved and got an iPhone. I’ve really liked having it so far, although I have experienced the unreliable 3G connection, poor battery life, and frequent application crashes of which others have complained. I have to assume that these issues will be fixed via a software update in the near future, so for now I’m just enjoying the technological convergence.
Perhaps my favorite “feature” of the iPhone is having a decent (though some would call it sub-par) camera with me at all times. What’s really cool is that the iPhone includes GPS tags for every photo that you take. This allows you to create albums like this one of my recent trip to Golden Gate Park. This is arguably useful, but it’s definitely really, really cool. Unfortunately, from what I can tell, iPhoto lacks the ability to create these maps, either natively or through an iPhoto plug-in. It seems silly that I need to upload my photos to the Web to accomplish this, and thus I hereby declare my First iPhoto Wish.
My Second iPhoto Wish also relates to the iPhone and a Web service which takes advantage of the phone’s capabilities even better than its applications do. It seems to me that Photos is Facebook’s really killer app so far, or at least the one that draws the most eyes to the site. I’m a fairly active Facebook user, and when I log in, what I’m most interested in seeing is the list of updated photos; it’s more interesting than, say, your recently-updated list of favorite music, or the non sequiturs on your Wall. What makes Photos especially cool is its ability to tag friends in your photos. At this point, I would go so far as to call it uncouth to not tag the people in your photos. Unfortunately, while Facebook provides an iPhone application which allows you to directly upload photos from your iPhone, it doesn’t allow you to tag the photos with friends. So, you need to upload the photo to Facebook (via your phone or computer), then log in with a browser to actually tag people. This is silly (as is the ability to fulfill my First iPhoto Wish in an analogous way by viewing a map on Facebook) and should be corrected.
An alternative would to rely upon the iPhone’s Photos application to do the tagging. What would be nice about that is that it would let you sync the tag information to your iPhoto library, which is helpful if you’re slightly uneasy, as I am, about entrusting your photos to Facebook. The problem there is the iPhone and iPhoto don’t know your Facebook friends - they only know the contacts on your phone and computer. Perhaps Apple could use the Facebook API to get around this limitation.
My Third iPhoto Wish is for the ability to assign photos taken on the iPhone to an album before syncing to the computer. As I understand it, the current sync procedure is this: when you plug your iPhone into your Mac, iTunes handles backing the phone up and also syncing audio and video files, calendars, contacts, and applications, and also uploading photos to the phone. iPhoto is used to download photos from the phone. While this makes a certain degree of sense, it’s not terribly convenient when you’re like me and only take a handful of pictures per day. I have to plug in the phone, wait for iPhoto to open, import the picture, assign it to an album (and tag the people in it, via the Title field), and then confirm the deletion of the original from the phone. It would be much better if I could take a picture using the phone, immediately assign it to the “San Francisco” album, and just let everything be synced automatically.