I’m playing with the new version of iPhoto and Photon and have to say that Photon completely rocks. In as little as three clicks I can export a single photo, or multiple photos, directly to my photoblog. This alone makes me want to use iPhoto more, but also, iPhoto now supports RAW files.

Two things about the RAW support though that concern me:

On my 1.2Ghz iBook iPhoto crawls when dealing with RAW images. This is likely more the fault of the slow hard drive than anything else, but still, a lot of people use RAW images. Soon, a lot of people will be using the Mac mini (I predict that it will end up the most popular Mac in a pretty short amount of time) and the base specs are very similar to my iBook. The lack of speed is difficult to deal with. I will try moving the photo library to a faster drive, and try it on my G5 when I get a chance.

The second concern – what does it do with my RAW images? Hopefully nothing – I’d like to think I can use iPhoto as my digital darkroom, retaining my “negatives” (the RAW files) as well as make “prints” (modified images). I’ll have to look into that. If anyone knows, drop me a line.

(cross posted to digitalslr.org)