Did I miss something in the Keynote last week? There was one feature, one incredible, can’t live without feature that Steve Jobs introduced a while back in 2005 that doesn’t appear to be in the new versions of iLife or iWork… Let me explain.

I was taking a look at iWeb last night when I noticed something was a little off. I wasn’t made aware of how the images were stored in those web pages. Do the images simply overlay the Apple example images, or do they replace them? For this I realized I would have to go into the source code, it has to be faster than surfing the Apple support forums.

Then, before I got chance to go elsewhere to check this out, I started thinking about images in general. Wasn’t Aperture just the most amazing application? Completely out of the blue, very new and it integrated just tones of new features really well. For example, it had this amazing , non-destructive database system for image editing… Wait a minute. Shouldn’t iPhoto have that?

I checked my Keynote notes and Steve didn’t mention it, I checked the preferences and help files and nothing to suggest it, I checked my Pictures folder and hey presto; not one, but two folders for image storage. Original and Modified folders for your iPhoto Library. Why? Since this new data-basing technology is already available to Apple, it’s already been developed, couldn’t this have been included?

While I pondered this as a major loss to one of Apples best pieces of software I started thinking why they wouldn’t. I quickly came to the conclusion that Apple knows it’s a pro feature, from a pro application and unlike Photoshop (which is often pirated and used from time to time by consumers instead of power/pro users) iPhoto is used all the time by everyone. Rosetta won’t handle any of Apples Pro apps until March and thus I don’t think this new technology will work on new Intel based systems until around the same time. Is this really a good enough reason not to include it though?

My prediction to come out of all this: iLife ‘07 will see the major upgrades, as will iWork ‘07 (where running on Intel chips may well prove to be a real bonus for Spreadsheet programs as well as the aforementioned database programs) including much of the currently “pro” technology being included in consumer level applications. For now though; we will have to put up with iPhoto’s poor file and disk management.