FrontRow 2 Review: Photos

October 27, 2007   2 Comments
Leopard is hear, and it brings FrontRow 2.0. Most of us are familiar with this interface on the AppleTV. With the menu too one side and a carousel of icons on the other, it picks up where FrontRow 1.x left off.

We installed leopard on a 1.6GHz MacMini which has been set up as a HTPC. Music was store on an external harddrive, along with tv shows and some movies, all managed by iTunes. A healthy sized iPhoto Library lives on the internal drive. On another external we stored other movies, all aliased in folders in the user/~movies folder.

Here are review of Photos Section:

With most HTPC applications out there, Photo managment is always seems to get the shaft. Here we get to see the most uninspiring designs and layouts. FrontRow 2 is no exception, but it does take steps to boost itself above most HTPC applications.

We gave our test a health collection of photos, spanning many years and over 5GB of images to browse. These are all located and managed by iPhoto 7.0. We have several events, several Smart Albums, and dumb Albums to test with.

First entering the Photos area, you are presented with several menu options. The first option was shared, followed by photos, and two standard filters, "Last Month", and "Last Import." The two filters display their images quickly, as if all 1253 pictures were already preloaded. This was incredibly impressive considering how it was to display pictures in Tiger's FrontRow. The Shared option quickly connects to shared albums out there as well, and we are on a G network. The Photos, we expected to be an unfiltered list of all the photos, but we were surprised to find the list of events to browse through. Following those menu options you have your Smart Albums and Dumb Albums, listed in the same order as in iPhoto. Once again the images appeared almost immediately. Playing the album brings up the familiar music and fading transitions from one photo to another.

Its certain that FrontRow 2 has improved its interaction with iPhoto. The quickness in the photo access is simply amazing, and the high-res images are stunning. We would of like to see an alternative way of viewing photos, perhaps in a grid view. Skipping from picture to picture in the slide show is still slow, which makes finding single photos in large albums a daunting task. Our only other request would be instead of listing all the Albums on the main screen use a sub menu, and bring Events to the main menu.

Labels: FrontRow, Leopard