Summary: Phoshare 1.5.2 will probably be the last version of Phoshare. If you rely on it, please make alternate plans before installing the next iPhoto update.
Phoshare had a good run, but it has gotten to the point where it is becoming increasingly challenging to keep up with new versions of iPhoto and Aperture. With iPhoto 9.4, the amount of data shared with other applications has been greatly reduced, and some features have already been lost:
- Keywords are completely gone. That is a big loss for Phoshare with iPhoto because iPhoto itself has no options to save metadata into the image files. Aperture can save metadata into image files, so there it is just a loss of convenience (you need to remember to hit "Generate Previews" ever once in a while).
- Downloaded images (from MobileMe, Facebook, etc.) are no longer shared, and Phoshare cannot export them.
- Face regions are recorded based on the geometry of the original image file. Cropping, rotating, or straightening an image will cause the face regions to no longer align with the edited image. Worse, if you crop a person out of the image, the face region data remain.
- No information about original image files. Phoshare makes an attempt to locate the original, but that is a bit flaky, and will not always work.
The information is still there, but only in the internal iPhoto/Aperture database. No API or documentation to these database tables are provided by Apple.
Phoshare was always an Open Source project, available with full source code, under the
Apache License 2.0. I'm willing to merge in essential fixes submitted by the community, but you are also welcome to make your own versions. See the
license (Section 4. Redistribution) for the conditions (it is quite generous).
I have transitioned my own photo library form iPhoto/Aperture to Adobe Lightroom some time ago, and no longer use Phoshare myself. Adobe Lightroom can be configured to save all your work into the image files automatically, so you don't even need a tool like Phoshare to liberate your work. But if you are looking for something that synchronizes your library with a folder tree like Phoshare, have a look at
Jeff Friedl's Folder Publisher for Lightroom. Such plugins are easily developed for Adobe Lightroom because it provides a
complete and fully documented interface for developers.
Tilman