Apple’s iPhoto 2009 has two great new features, Faces and Places. One lets you identify people, the other where photos were taken. It appears to merge with FaceBook and Flickr too but I haven’t tried that yet.
Faces: Wow, the face recognition stuff is pretty cool. Add a name to a person and it helps you identify all the photos with that person. It took some time, but it’s really great.
What’s Faces missing? An easy way to show every face that doesn’t have a name attached. Seems simple enough, thought I maybe I could build a rule, but no go. Fix this and I’m happy with this part. I’ve got 4,000 photos in iPhoto and I’m guessing less than 1% are of people I know.
I’m also afraid to tag photos of me as a kid, will it confuse it? I want to mark some people from behind, will that mess up the algorithm?
As an added bonus, if you upload photos to FaceBook and other people tag the it’s supposed to pull them back down to your computer tagged!
Places: A way to tag all your photos with a location. You do have to specify the photos, so it takes some time. It’s not just cities though, you can put in the name of a statium or roller rink and it’ll tag them with that location. It gives you a map with all the pins in place.
What’s Places missing? A lot! But most seems to be easy to remedy. (Or maybe I just don’t know how to do it).
Place needs a way to show all photos without a place attached to it (sound familiar). I sort of cheated with this one and built a rule for places with no spaces and it worked, until I got to “Egypt”, that didn’t have a space in it, if I could identify the cities those would fall out of the to-do list.
When I type a place, the first few choices should be from places I’ve already put it.
Places needs a way to mark a picture as non-location based (so when they fix the above part it’ll stop asking me about those blank ones).
It’s slow when opening the map with the pins, really slow, can’t imagine when I get more in place.
Bonus (needed) feature for Places: Let me plug in my GPS and you can tag my photos based on where I was! How cool would that be (need an option to adjust for time zones)?
Otherwise the feature set appears to be the same, just two new features…
For this one reason, I might be sad that I bought the computer last year…
I do have the iPhoto 2008, which was a great improvement over my 4 year old version. I am really liking the “event” folders. It’s been really easy to sort the photos. I can then pick out the even that I want to share and just open that, and not have to go through EVERY photo to get there. I can also re-arrange them. I like the Event folders better than creating folders along the side. I really wanted to sort the whole library and I couldn’t before. So, this is good.
Is the new places and faces worth the upgrade from 08 to 09?
If you like Events, you’ll love Faces and Places. Events are useful, Faces/Places are amazing!
Groups of kids to be tagged in photos would be great (perfect for yearbook class). And if you are uploading to FaceBook (if you have permission) other people can tag the photos and they get pulled back to your computer.
And for places you can can group tag by date. So this whole week I can tag as “Costa Rica” and give it a wide radius of the whole country(-ish). And then pick particular days and narrow it down to a specific city or location.
The maps actually let me pick a specific roller-rink where I took some photos (much narrower than a city or street) to tag my photos. My hope is that FaceBook might add places to their tagging and make this even more useful.
Related cartoon:
http://www.joyoftech.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1209.html
The cartoon is GREAT! :)
Thanks!