iPhoto Library Manager 4.0 private beta

I’m happy to be able to announce a bit of what I’ve been working on lately - namely, version 4.0 of iPhoto Library Manager! It’s far enough along at this point that I’d like to start doing some beta testing on it, to try it out with a wider range of configurations and hammer out any bugs that might crop in situations that it hasn’t been run in yet. So, I’ve decided to start up a private beta testing program – anyone who’s interested in trying out the new version and not afraid of running into some bugs in the process can sign up to be a beta tester.  To give a brief overview of what’s in the new version, some of the major new features include: An all new interface - you can now browse your actual photos from within iPhoto Library Manager, so you don’t need to open iPhoto just to see your photos A new “Find Duplicates” command that lets you search libraries for duplicate photos and take actions on them, such as flagging, assigning a keyword, or moving to the trash The new duplicate detection scheme can also be used when merging, to give you finer control of which photos get included in the merged library When copying albums/events or merging libraries, you can now see a preview of what your iPhoto library will look like as a result of the copy/merge before going through with actually copying all the photos over You can search your photos by name, keywords, faces, and more, either searching a single library, or all your libraries at once An enhanced Rebuild Library command now scavenges orphaned photos from the library package, if iPhoto has lost track of them Those are just some of the new features, there are of course many other tweaks and improvements. There is no final release date for iPLM 4 yet - that will of course depend on how smoothly the beta program goes and how much fixing up needs to be done before the final release. I’m not ready to announce exact pricing yet, but if you already have a license for iPLM 3, there will be upgrade pricing available, and anyone buying a new copy after today’s date will be eligible for a free upgrade. This is so nobody has to worry about whether they should wait for the new version to come out before buying - if you buy iPLM 3 today, you’ll get iPLM 4 for free. iPLM 4 will require OS X 10.6.8 or later and iPhoto 8 or later. If you’re interested in helping to test iPLM 4, fill out the signup form here to register for the beta program. You don’t need to be a current user of iPhoto Library Manager to sign up - I’d actually be interested to have some brand new users try it out as well, to see what kinds of issues they run into. When your help is needed, you’ll receive an e-mail including instructions on how to get started with the beta version of iPLM 4. I may choose to stagger the release of new versions to testers over time, so that I have a few brand new testers on each update, so it could be a while before you receive an e-mail. I’m really excited about this new release, and I’d like to make sure to squash as many bugs as possible before releasing it to the world. If you have some spare time to try it out and see if you can break some things, it will 4.0 come out sooner and with as much reliability as possible. And of course, I wouldn’t leave you all hanging without at least one teaser screenshot. :-)