iPhoto ’09
iPhoto ’09 became available in stores today. I was excited about it because it has two new features that I think we can use at our camp, Places and Faces. It also makes it easy to publish photos to Facebook or Flickr. I tested out the new version by opening our Wedding iPhoto album… lots of people and a few locations to identify.
Locations
If your camera has GPS capabilities (like the iPhone 3G, for example) then iPhoto will automatically recognize that from the photo’s metadata (EXIF tags). If not, you can select one or more photos and it will bring up a map so you can find a location, ‘drop a pin’, and label it.
I am hopeful that there will be an easy way to associate third-party GPS tracks with photos taken based on date and time. I don’t have a lot of experience with this myself, but I know that there are plenty of people out there who are interested in this… so it should happen soon enough.
Faces
The face recognition portion is impressive, but clearly 1.0. There are still some rough edges, but at this point, it’s like the dog that walks on its hind legs; it’s not how well it does it, it’s that it can do it at all.
Faces that are head-on are usually identified pretty well. Faces that are obstructed, side profile, making weird faces, etc. it might have trouble with. Mustaches and glasses (especially sunglasses) gave it problems as well. Faces on an angle (unless it was 90 degrees) confused it, too.
Uh, get that junk out of my way
When iPhoto recognizes (or thinks! it recognizes) a face in a photo, it puts a white box around it. Underneath that there’s a caption, which will either say, “unknown face”, or, “Is this So-and-so?” You can tab between these boxes and hit return, either to fill in a name or to confirm/deny the “so-and-so?” question. It can be a bit confusing, and more than once the focus defaulted to the ‘Done’ button, which kicked me out of ‘Names’ mode.
The unfortunate thing about the white name boxes is that group shots tend to have a LOT of these boxes in them, all at once. So iPhoto might be asking you, “Is this so-and-so?” or telling you it’s an “unknown face” but you can’t see the person because they’re blocked by all of the white boxes and captions! It also does not seem as if you can zoom in on the photo in order to spread the boxes out, which is frustrating.
My long-lost cousin twice removed
If you start typing in the name of a person, it presents you with a list of the already-known people that might complete the name you’re typing. However, it gives you an alphabetical list. This is frustrating because my wife Christina shows up about a million times in our wedding photos, but someone named Christian (who is in about three pictures total) shows up before her in the list. It would be nice if iPhoto would order the photos by ‘most frequently used names’, or at least give you the option. Or, if you just dragged a face box, maybe it could re-analyze that area and make a best guess.
Did you think much had changed in the last few seconds?
There were also photos where it was basically the same picture, two or three times in a row. (You know, you take a few in the hopes that at least one will come out?) Sometimes iPhoto would know everyone in one photo, and nobody in the next one, or get people wrong. This made me wonder if anyone had thought about comparing the date/timestamp on each photo and comparing the positions of the faces it found (maybe weighted by probability that this face belongs to so-and-so) to make a better guess as to who is in this photo that was taken five seconds after the previous one.
I already identified this
Our wedding photographer had given us an album of his hand-picked, color-corrected photos. I had these in another ‘event’ (iPhoto smart album by date) but had already gone in and identified all of the people in the original versions. I was surprised that it wasn’t better at even guessing who the people were, since I had basically identified the same exact photos a bit earlier. (The contents of the boxes was almost exactly the same, just with different color levels or contrast.) It frustrated me that I would have to go in and do this all over again, drag boxes over people’s faces, etc.
Cousin Ned looks like a Yheti (I mean, even moreso)
When you view the list of faces (which is cute: they’re all “Tacked up” on a corkboard), iPhoto ’09 will show you the first photo of each person you identified. This is NOT necessarily the best picture you have of them! Fortunately, you can double-click to view a custom album of all photos that have that person identified in them. If you highlight one of the better photos, in the Event menu you can pick, ‘make key photo’ and now that will be the photo displayed on the ‘corkboard’ display of all Faces. (That one took a minute to figure out, but I’m glad you can do it.)
I realized that you can’t just publish a single image to a specific gallery on facebook; iPhoto wants you to put photos into an album, then publish that whole album to facebook. I created one called ‘Wedding Photos’ and went ahead by titling and adding a description to all of my photos. However, only the titles of the photos made it over, not the descriptions, as far as I could tell.
The cool thing, however, was that all of the photos I had tagged with people’s faces were automatically added to Facebook! This was a very nice surprise and I give it an A+. One thing to be cautious about: if you put kids’ last names in when you identify them, you may want to remove these from the Facebook albums unless their parents are okay with it.
First impressions
iPhoto ’09 has some cool new features. There are still some rough edges to be worked out, but I’m hoping that we see a minor version update very soon with a few fixes and improvements. In spite of these, the new features are very strong and make the product even easier to use. Well worth the money.
Thanks Thom! That’s really useful , and it’s the first review of iPhoto I’ve read. It sounds like the facebook integration, location and the faces make it a good buy at the price, for me.