I’m not typically a Wal-mart basher. Nor am I typically an Apple basher. My complaint today revolves around a problem that arises when Apple’s self-interest, combined with a small dollop of cluelessness on the part of WalMart, makes things more difficult than it should.
The background – my wife is used to using Picasa. There are several things about it that drives me nuts related to organization, etc (many of which they had since fixed), but my wife really can wrap her brain around it better than iPhoto. One of the things it did brilliantly was export for online prints. Especially to wal-mart.
Now, it’s understandable why iPhoto only prints to Apple, and the iPhoto print services (especially cards!) are top-notch. Nevertheless there are now plug-ins to easily export from iPhoto to flickr, picasa web, etc. Most of these are free, or at worst (like the free stand-alone flickr tool) play well with iPhoto by allowing drag and drop.
Now. If Wal-mart didn’t want to integrate at all with iPhoto or the Mac and play dumb just like they do for firefox, that would be fine. What bothers me is the “quickload” tool they provide is not even as functional as the “open” dialog box that’s the default in Leopard, as it does not give me direct access to my iPhoto albums and events.
Here’s what they should do. They should either create an iPhoto plugin like the guys at Google and Facebook did, or do like Flickr and create an uploader that allows you to drag pictures from iPhoto into the uploader.