I bought Viv a Minolta DiMage X20 as an anniversary present. My primary criteria were size, cost, and standard batteries (I hate manufacturer-proprietary rechargeables). It’s currently available at Amazon for $170, a somewhat different price than I paid.

I was very surprised at the camera’s bounty of features, which includes (as do many cameras these days) low-res digital video clips as an option.

Shortly, I’ll get Viv up to speed on using iPhoto, storing her photos outside iPhoto as a backup, and so forth. However, I noticed that she has a strong tendency to flip back and forth between still snapshots and movie clips when she’s using the camera, which means that iPhoto will simplay fail to meet her needs. She’ll expect to see chronologically organized galleries that incorporate both kinds of media seamlessly.

That means I need to look at iPhoto alternatives.

FootTrack presents itself as iPhoto for movie clips. Which is nice, and all, but not quite what I want.

Back in the day, I relied on iView Media Pro to do pretty much exactly that. Unfortunately, I hated the HTML and web-oriented features it had, and so don’t know if it will do what I want or not.

I suppose the single most important feature of iPhoto to me today is the presence of that iPhoto to Gallery plugin. Ideally, an alternate desktop multimedia manager would employ the iPhoto plugin API. Which would be nice.

iView offers a (mighty pokey) user forum, so praps there’s an answer there.

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