DigitalSandbox

So I have been playing with the hacked version of Front Row that has been floating around the internet. And I love it. And big props to the guys who released Salling Clicker scripts to control it. It is actually a great way to browse your media collection and I look forward to Apple releasing an iBox style device that uses it.

Here’s the problem though. Front Row is actually smart enough to look in my Movies folder and show them. What’s wrong with that? Well, it also looks in my iTunes library for any movies that I have added there. So I get two copies of every movie.

So now we have to ask the question. Why can’t we get an iTunes/iPhoto-esque program for managing movies? It seems like Apple is kind of getting a little kludgey in their iLife integration lately. Let me show you a few examples of what I mean.

First, they added the ability to sync your photos to your iPod photo. This was great, but the syncing was handled by iTunes, not iPhoto. Now at the time it was okay because iTunes was syncing your music and the iPod is a music player. At least they didn’t store your iPhoto library in iTunes. It just read from it.

Then we get the ability to store video in iPhoto. Not too bad, really. All of today’s digital cameras will do little video files as well. You may as well store everything shot with your digital camera together, right?

Then iTunes starts doing video. At first this didn’t really make sense, but then they started offering music video downloads and started showing movie trailers via the iTunes Store. And with the new iPod out again I suppose it makes some sort of sense to sync these up via iTunes.

But now Front Row comes along and it starts looking in iTunes and in your Movies folder. So if you had some home movies and you tossed them into iTunes so you could watch them full screen you now have two copies.

It starts looking like Apple hasn’t really thought out a good way to handle these various forms of media. Why can’t iTunes and iPhoto use the Movies folder to store movie files? Why can’t we have a program (iVideo, maybe) that catalogs video like the other two catalog music and photos? Why not use iSync to handle the syncing? It should be able to handle keeping all of that straight, it is how you sync your Address Book and iCal to your iPod after all.

I hope the next version of iLife addresses these inconsistencies. But for now I think I am going to keep all of my movies in the Movies folder and take them out of both iTunes and iPhoto.