[quote name='cphoffman42']
> [quote name='veggiedude']
> >
folklore said:
> > It's not like Apple's engineers just decided to make copies willy-nilly in order to waste space. They made a conscious decision to sacrifice hard drive space in order to gain performance.
> >
> > I'm okay with that. I can always buy more hard drive space.
> It is called non-destructive editing.
>
Yeah, but Photoshop and Lightroom do non-destructive editing without creating multiple copies of the image and quadrupling the space needed. For those of us with large photo libraries made up mostly of raw files, iPhoto is a huge hog. That Lightroom (a program that does the same and much more) has solved this problem proves that Apple could do things to fix the issue if they wanted, but instead they add stuff like faces. I get that better hard drive usage is probably not going to inspire a lot of people to upgrade, whiles faces might, but it's still really frustrating. Maybe I wouldn't be as irritated if I could set iWork and iTunes to sync with images in Lightroom so that I could avoid using iPhoto entirely, but I can't. :(
Sorry to rant about this - I know this isn't something everyone cares about.
A quick point of fact: only the "Modified" folder has anything to do with non-destructive editing. The thumbnails don't. I mention it because that was part of the discussion earlier in the thread. Keeping a set of thumbnail images is all about speed.
As far as Lightroom v. iPhoto... that's probably not a great comparison. Lightroom's direct competitor isn't iPhoto, it's Aperture. If I recall properly, Aperture does non-destructive editing by applying the edits on-the-fly. That's one way to do non-destructive editing. iPhoto takes the other route, creating multiple versions (modified and original) of the file.
It's not that Apple ignores disk use issues. Like I said in an earlier post, it's all trade-offs. Applying edits on-the-fly makes sense when you have oodles of RAW images. RAW images are large. And people that have oodles of RAW images have heretofore been professionals - and that's the market space for Aperture and Lightroom. Pros are the core market for those tools.
I'll agree that iPhoto's handling of RAW images leaves quite a bit to be desired compared to other tools like Photoshop. But consumers haven't used RAW until very recently. Consumers have mostly used one form of lossy compression or another (usually JPEG). JPEG images have been small enough that creating a few copies here and there wasn't a problem. And it's been preferable to create those copies, using more disk space, rather than render edits (and thumbnails) on-the-fly which would greatly decrease speed. That is especially true with G3 and G4 processors.
The equation is slowly changing as consumers move more into RAW, and as cameras increase the megapixel count even JPEGs have gotten larger. Intel's processors also perform better. It might eventually make sense to render images on-the-fly in iPhoto. I'm sure Apple's engineers are looking into it.
One other wrinkle: At this point, it would basically require a rewrite of iPhoto's core code to change how it manages images. And after the uproar over the iMovie rewrite, I'm not sure that's a good idea. :)