Joe Auricchio

Dear Lazyweb: I’m looking for something to manage my photos. For now, I use a hierarchy of folders to divide things up by date. QuickLook and Preview are my primary viewing tools. I only have a couple gigs, spanning maybe a hundred discrete events, so I’m not a very heavy user.

iPhoto uses 80% of my CPU at idle. Just sitting there, open. It only exports web galleries to .Mac, which is worthless to me. “Events” feels like a waste of code… they could have just autosplit albums on import and let albums optionally be strongly associated with dates. And I still don’t like how iPhoto hides all the image files in its bundle in the Pictures folder, making it nigh-impossible to find the files with any other tool. Verdict: Not interested.

Aperture 1.5 crashed on launch, repeatably. I’m hovering just above the minimum system requirements anyway. Shame, it looked decent. I haven’t ruled it out… but if it’s anything like Apple’s usual products it won’t run very well on my Powerbook5,4 anyway.

So what else is out there?

I used iView Media Pro a half-dozen years ago (yipes!). It was a bit clunky but it worked. Has anybody else used it more recently?

Bridge looks worthless to anyone who’s not heavily invested in Adobe products. Right out.

From what I saw, Lightroom looks more aimed at photo editing than organization—the opposite of iPhoto—which makes it a bit less suitable for me. It also looks heavy. But I’m still very interested in it. Does anyone around here have a copy I can fiddle with?

Not interested in Photoshop Elements; Save For Web isn’t quite enough to justify the endless you-must-be-an-admin-user style nightmares.

My alternate nick on IRC is ‘utf8′. I use that pretty much whenever I sign on from anything except my Linux server’s irssi. Since the main account jauricchio is already on, I can’t use that of course. So I use utf8. I like it, because it just looks like an inscrutable acronym. Plus it’s short and nicely pronounceable.

When I signed up for Xbox Live last week, I couldn’t recover my old gamertag. So I chose a new one: utf8.

Now I want to link my Live account to an email address (really, to a Passport account), but I’d rather not have it reveal my name, as most of my existing addresses do.

utf8 is too short for a GMail account name.

So how do these sound?

• 8bitclean@whatever
• omgutfbbq@whatever or omg.utf.bbq@whatever
• omgutf8bbq@whatever or omg.utf8.bbq@whatever
• Completely open to suggestions!