kirktastic

I’ve been playing with iPhoto 09 this afternoon. The big new features that it adds is Faces, Places and an easy way to upload photos to Flickr or Facebook.

Places will automagically read the GPS lat/lon data if you have a camera with GPS. My iPhone takes not-so-great photos but does have GPS so when I clicked on the Places view there were already some pin drops on the map. You can easily add location data to your existing photos. Unlike when you manually add location data to Flickr, for example, you can’t place the pin at a particular location, you’re instead stuck placing it in Paris rather than plopping right on top of where the photo was taken. iPhoto uses Google Maps, but in the little pop it will place the pin in Paris but not let you scroll around or move the pin. No biggy, since when you want to look at the photo on the global map you want a dot in Portland, not a million dots over Portland. I’m sure my next camera will have GPS so this should be fun. What sucks is how many places I’ve been to that I don’t have photos of. Pre digital camera era photos that I’ve lost (or didn’t come out due to some camera snafu — my whole N.California Redwoods trip, for example, La Paz and Los Cabos Mexico — or didn’t bring a camera).

It also demonstrates there’s so many places on this planet I haven’t been to yet. Like the Southern Hemisphere for example.

Faces has facial recognition technology to help you tag photos by people’s faces. It took about 45 minutes to scan my 5,000 or so photos for faces. I don’t actually take a lot of photos of people. I’m not one of those people that take a picture of myself in front of monuments I’ve visited either. But I do have several shots of my family and friends to it to look over. Once it scans all of your photos, you click on a photo and click on name and it will highlight the people’s faces in the shot. You teach it to recognize someone and then it places that person on a cork board library by their name. So after ID a person as Nancy, it would offer suggestions of other photos that might have Nancy it in. It did a decent job, but it also had some hilarious guesses, too. Many of the pics I have of my friend Dave have him wearing hats. When guessing faces for Dave, it appears to believe that a hat is permanently attached to his head.

The face recognition technology isn’t perfect. It does recognize faces in phot
os of photographs — like this tabloid cover. It recognized Katie Holmes and someone next to Jessica Simpson, but didn’t recognize Jessica Simpson’s face or the larger Brittney Spears face.

Then again sometimes it sees a face where there isn’t one:


Contrary to what I read on the interwebs, iPhoto 09 does not recognize a cat’s face. Or at least not my cats’ faces.

Flickr integration. For years I’ve been using Frasier Spiers’ excellent FlickrExport to get my photos from iPhoto to Flickr easily. I wondered if the Flickr sharing iPhoto 09 would mean I didn’t need this plug-in anymore. Turns out I do. In Apple’s zeal to make it simple, uploading to Flickr is too simple. No real options for Flickr uploading — you can decide who can view the photo you’re going to upload and if you want a low res or full res version to upload. You don’t get to name the photo, or tag the photo (or remove tags you might not want to share on the interwebs). To make it worse, it uploads the photo into a set based on the date. If you just upload on photo of your cat, it goes into a set of just one photo. And the set is named after the date the photo was taken. You can’t change the settings to not put things into a set, or to let you name the set, or put the photos into an existing set. And the icing on the failboat cake is for a photo I uploaded to test had GPS information on it it didn’t pass that data along to Flickr. So if I wanted to place it on my Flickr map, then I have to manually enter the information. Fortunately, FlickrExport can do everything I want and works just fine on iPhoto 09.

All and all, I’m pretty happy with iPhoto 09. It isn’t perfect, but it is a nice upgrade from the already great iPhoto 08.

iLife 09 also come with iWeb with lets you do these things called “blogs” as well as GarageBand and iMovie. I don’t use iWeb at all as it is way too simple. I only use GarageBand to create ring tones for my iPhone. And I don’t use iMovie at all. From what I’ve read GarageBand offers lessons — some free, some $$$. You can get Sting to teach you guitar, or Ben Folds to teach you piano.