iPhoto'09: First Impressions

iPhoto'09 , how I was waiting for you! As the children are waiting for a new toy, or as before, back in school, waiting for the release of their favorite book. Finally it happened and iLife'09 fell into my hands. Of all the programs included in this package, iPhoto is undoubtedly my favorite. I simply adore beautiful pictures and photographs, and, as a devoted collector, I put all my acquired, photographed and found on the vastness of the world wide web goods into this box. So, the good news: now it will be even easier to find the right pictures / images in all this limitless array of images. Two new magic boxes were added to my miracle box, which now sort photos not only by events, but also by faces and places where they were taken. “Hooray, hooray, great news,” you say, “but we knew that from Macworld itself.” We knew something, but now at last there was an opportunity to try it all.

Faces

Faces , or Faces in the English version, helps to group photos by people. For example, I have many pictures of my little brother, but how to look for them in all events, if someone needs to show what my little dinosaur looks like.

iPhoto is now smart, it can recognize faces by itself. At the first start, it will analyze all the photos, which may take some time, depending on how many pictures are in its library. Then you can begin to introduce this intellectual program to your relatives and friends. To do this, click the "Name" buttonin the lower left corner of the toolbar. From my own experience, it is better to start with some kind of event where there are a lot of people, call iPhoto, who is who, and then look for additional pictures of each named person. iPhoto is very diligent, trying to recognize absolutely everyone. When it gets to know a little and looks at the people in your photos, it recognizes some photos. In cases of doubt, iPhoto will start asking, “Is this dad?” If you start with just one person and look for all his photos, then iPhoto will often offer unrecognized faces to someone similar to him. The more a program trains, the smarter it becomes, the better it recognizes in photographs people it already knows.

Learning iPhoto will take time, especially when there are a lot of photos, and there are even more people in these pictures. It will be easier further: you will not try to recognize people in all your photos every few years, but only from a certain event.

I must say, I was pleasantly surprised how well iPhoto does its job. In my case, on average, 80-95% of correctly recognized photographs out of a hundred. Considering that at first I tried to find all the pictures of one person, then another, and so on, which complicated the work of iPhoto, it could work better. Very good iPhoto recognizes faces in photos with good quality when a person holds his head straight and looks straight into the camera. If the head is turned or tilted, if the person wears a hat with large brim (hello, summer vacation), he is heavily wrapped in a scarf, hood and hat, like little children in winter, or dressed in glasses for conspiracy, then in some cases iPhoto may not to guess that this is a person’s face. This is not scary, as there is a button “Add a lack of. face". Click on it, circle the conspirator’s face in the box and tell iPhoto what his name is.

Many complain that iPhoto cannot recognize animal faces. I don’t have any pets, and I don’t really like taking pictures of animals, so I don’t think this is such a terrible omission. For those who want to see their pets' faces on a par with other family members, there is good news: Roberto Baldwin from MacLife taught iPhoto to recognize kitty faces.

A couple more funny facts: no matter how grimy my little one is, iPhoto almost unmistakably determined that it was him. This is what a small photogenic creature means. But my friend Olya did not want to recognize at all, she guessed somewhere in 50% of cases, and in the remaining 50% she simply did not know who it was. This is what an artistic, vibrant and versatile personality means. I didn’t want to associate my children's photographs with me, but on the other hand offered Vanina photos as possible options, where he smiles widely. (Who would have thought, I thought, we are not a bit like him). But it was assumed that in the photographs of my documents I was not at all at all, but my friend Vlad. I understand him: I have changed too much over the past 5-6 years.

Places

Places , or Places in the English version of the application, are no longer as interesting as Facesbut still informative too. Suppose you go skiing in the mountains every year and want to show someone all the photos from this place. In this case, the function will be very useful. It is tied to Google maps. You are lucky if your camera or phone can determine the coordinates. Then you don’t have to do anything: the location of the pictures will be determined automatically. If you do not have a camera with a geolocation function, you can mark on the map where the pictures were taken. You do not need to specify the coordinates, you can just start typing the name of the city / village in Russian or English, and then select from the list below. Lucky residents of the United States, where Google knows every house and street. Our maps are harder, but large cities can be found. Only now, if you introduce the regional center (for example, Kiev, Dnepropetrovsk, Odessa, Zaporozhye), he perceives this as an area and puts a pin in the area, not in the city. This is not scary, it can be moved.

When you come across such an interesting and useful functionality, there is a desire to use it. I would like to buy an Eye-Fi card for the camera, so that it itself determines the place where the photos were taken. The craving for a change of places begins to prevail, I want to travel, travel, so that there are more of these pins on the map.

Flickr & Facebook

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Previously, Apple’s native programs got along well and made good friends with third-party applications. Now Apple has taken a step forward: our beloved iPhoto will be friends with Facebook and Flickr .

To upload photos, you need to click the corresponding button at the bottom of the toolbar. Next, Flickr will transfer you to Safari to the service login page to allow iPhoto Uploader access to your account. Facebook will allow you to do this without leaving iPhoto: a new panel for registration will open there.

I couldn’t immediately upload the photos to Flickr, because I have a regular limited account there. This means that I cannot upload more than three photo albums (Sets). iPhoto uploads each event into a separate album. So I had to delete one of the existing photo albums, and iPhoto allowed me to upload photos. This means that it's time for all of us to buy Pro-accounts on Flickr in order to fully enjoy the delights of this service. Before starting synchronization, you can choose who you want to allow access to your photos: make them private, allow friends, relatives or everyone to watch. After uploading images, a direct link to this photo album on Flickr will appear in the main window near the album name in the main window. When the photos are already uploaded, you can add them names, descriptions and tags, and this information will be automatically synchronized when you enter iPhoto, or if you click on the appropriate button to the right next to the album name. In my opinion, it is very convenient.

With Facebook, things are similar. You select photos, iPhoto uploads them to the web, and a link appears. Now the most interesting thing: when you recognized faces, you could not only indicate the name, but also give a short description to the person and indicate his e-mail. It is by the email address that Facebook will search for these people in your friends list and send them a notification that you have posted the photos in which they are present. Also, if there is someone in the photo that you don’t know, your Facebook friends can indicate who they are, and this information will be synchronized with iPhoto. I think that even more fans of Facebook will appear among the macro-players, as this makes it so interesting and attractive.

Additionally:

- Read: Nick Santilli 's article “First Look in iPhoto'09” on The Apple Blog;

- Listen: The 22nd edition of MacSpoon Podcast.