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Is the new Journal feature in iPhoto for iOS the start of something bigger?
I certainly hope so. One of the joys of using a Mac with MobileMe was that someone with little or no computer sophistication could get photos easily published to the web. Great for families sharing with distant relatives and friends, or anyone who needed to get a gallery of photos to the internet only had to make a couple of quick clicks and it was done. It was sad when Apple announced the demise of MobileMe, which goes dark this June, and the loss of MobileMe galleries. Photo Stream is cool, but the photos expire after a month. Many Apple customers were hoping for a replacement for those galleries, and the new iOS version of iPhoto is riding to the rescue. What's offered is more powerful in some ways than the MobileMe galleries. The templates are prettier, you have more control of the appearance of the pages, and you can include location data and even weather. You can't password protect sites, but maybe that will come. Photo Journals is a nice feature and not a direction I expected Apple to go. There's one fly in this ointment: iPhoto for OS X does not have the Photo Journals feature. It allows sharing to MobileMe (not for long), Flickr and Facebook. Some photo sites, like Picasa, provide plug-ins that will let you upload directly from iPhoto. It would seem pretty obvious that the Mac OS version of iPhoto would allow this, but as of today it doesn't. If iPhoto for Mac gets the Photo Journal feature it will go a long way toward making customers happy, especially the people thinking about moving from the PC to the Mac. For my friends who have recently made the switch, they often mention the simplicity of MobileMe galleries. Tim Cook hinted last fall that some of the expiring MobileMe features could be rolled into iCloud, and this seems to be a start. Maybe that good idea is not dead yet. Readers, how about you? Do you want to see Photo Journals across the entire Apple product line?
