McMahonWeb

When Apple announced the release of the new .Mac galleries, with neat new ways to view photos and direct integration with iPhoto 08, I was pretty excited. I do not personally use iPhoto, but my wife does.

I was also sort of hoping that initial support in iPhoto could potentially lead to support in Aperture.

I could not wait to try this out, and as soon as I upgraded the version of iLife for my wife, I immediately published several sets of photos as a test. The initial sync took quite a while, and after a couple failures, it finally did publish.

What was to follow, was a perfect example of a really neat idea, delivered poorly. Apple deserves credit for making the gallery look really elegant. The features are really nice. The problem, it is far to slow for a reasonable persons patience. It is incredibly bad.

In late November, Apple supposedly worked to improve the sub-par load performance. Over the past several weeks, I have attempted to use the gallery I created months earlier. There has been little to no improvement in performance, irrelevant of which machine or internet connection I load it on.

Attempting to load it on my parent’s computer, which has satellite internet, is an exercise in futility.

If you are interested in seeing an example:

Here is a demo gallery created by Apple when they announced the new galleries.

I am really surprised Apple let this release in such a weak condition.  The .Mac service has already had enough criticism for slow updates and features.  They finally release several improvements, but fail to deliver on one that could be a huge winner for the service.  Apple, please fix the galleries, we would really like to use them.