iLife '09

Pros: Garage band is perfect for making ringtones and sending them to itunes for free. Garage band is also good for editing music. iphoto is pretty and integrates easily to facebook and mobileme. Geotagging is cool and accurate most of the time

Cons: Several issues with iphoto that will be explained below. imovie didn't not allow me to edit a movie and export it with a non-imovie format. I couldn't figure out how to record my voice in garage band without that annoying ticking sound

Summary: I've had to start a new iphoto library 5 times in less than 7 months because iphoto either would show a big exclamation mark when I try enlarging a photo (which means iphoto can lo longer find the file) or have several duplicates of one photo thus taking up extra space on my hard drive. I've always had to start a new library thinking I've fixed a problem but some how those exclamation marks creep back in to iphoto. And I'm not moving photos around or renaming. Now, speaking of renaming, if I import photos directly from my iphone to iphoto, I can rename the title of the photo in iphoto to whatever I want but the original name of the photo will still be the name it had from the camera. For example, when the camera takes the photo, the original name of it might be "image001", I can rename it to "tarheel 23" in iphoto but the original name of the photo will still be image001. I want the original file name to match the name in iphoto. One of the several reasons is the following: I have signatures set up in my "mail" accounts. If I use iphoto to email any photos, then the signatures are not on the email. Therefore, I would have the drag the photo from iphoto to the desktop and wala, the name of the photo has reverted back to the original name of the photo. It may sound small but I don't like that fact that only iphoto recognizes name changes when you change the name of a photo file in iphoto. Another thing that annoyed me today was that I have my photos on my iphone synced with iphoto and somehow today all the preview thumbnails on the iphone would show. I spent literally two hours with a customer service rep and nobody could help. Finally, I decided to start a new iphoto library and sync the phone then. And it worked. So somehow the library got corrupted or something. I think Apple subcontracted iphoto because this is so reminiscent of PC problems. Also, I still haven't figured out how some photos mysteriously disappear resulting in the big exclamation mark while other photos will show up as multiple duplicates. No matter how many times I go through and clean up my photos, one of these two problems arise. It's horrible. My major problem is with iphoto and after today decided I am going to try using another photo managing program. Oh, another thing. I had to buy photoshop elements just to be able to do some of the simple editing. If I use iphoto, iphoto keeps a copy of the original file I edited and also the edited photo thus taking up more hard drive space. I need another advanced degree to understand more of garage band other than making ringtones. The same goes with imovie. What's the purpose if imovie if I can't edit and save a movie in a non-imovie format. Maybe I can and just don't know how to do it. I love my iphone and Macbook Pro but hate iphoto.