Playing with Faces and Places in iPhoto 09′

I was very happy to have received my $10 copy of iLife in the mail yesterday from Apple. I purchased my new MacBook a few weeks back and that allowed me to upgrade to the new version for a mere $10. If you have purchased a Mac in the last month or so be sure to get your copy, it is worth it.

I installed iLife 09′ last night and got a chance to play with the new Faces and Places features in iPhoto. We have roughly 20GBs of photos which comes out to about 10,000 photos (and my oldest son is only 5 years old!). I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the results of both of these new features.

Faces in iPhoto 09’

When opening iPhoto 09′ for the first time I was informed that my iPhoto library needed to be upgraded. After clicking OK the upgrade proceeded and was finished in about 30 seconds. From there the faces scanner kicked in and informed me that it was going to scan my pictures in order to identify faces. The initial estimate for this process was around 300 minutes but actually took around an hour.

After the faces scan was complete I clicked on the faces link and expected to see a whole bunch of faces grouped together. That was not the case as there were no faces in the faces area. From there I went to events and opened one and selected a photo of myself.At the bottom of the photo was a new button labeled "Name". Clicking on that button brought up a box around my face with the label “Unknown Face”. Clicking on the label allowed me to put my name there.

Once I had identified myself then I went back to the Faces section where my picture now showed up. Clicking on it showed the picture that I had ID’d as me and a bar labeled “Dan may also be in the photos below” with photos under it . Clicking on the “Confirm Name” button takes each of those photos and focused on the face on each photo that it thought was me. On each photo I single clicked to confirm the photos that were indeed me me and double clicked on photos to confirm that they were not me. iPhoto was pretty accurate in it’s identification.

After going through all the photos that iPhoto thought were me I clicked on the “Done” button and iPhoto did it’s magic and rescanned all of the remaining unconfirmed photos based on my selections and brought up more photos that it thought could be me. Each time I did this the results seemed to be more refined until it ran out of suggestions. In the end it caught about 75% of the actual photos of me which is not bad.

I went on to do this for 9 other people in my family which probably account for around 50% of the photos that we have. This took a good hour and a half to do but did not seem tedious as it was kind of fun to see all of the different photos of people, especially the kids.

Places in iPhoto 09’

Places in iPhoto 09’ was different then Faces in that when I initially clicked on the Places button the map was already populated with a couple of pins in various places. Clicking on one of the pins brought up some pictures that I took while in Washington DC when there last year. In looking at the photos I noticed that they were pictures that I had taken with my iPhone. iPhoto automatically read the GPS data that the iPhone automatically records when taking a photo and used it to automatically place it on the map. I thought that was pretty cool.

As cool as it was though the majority on my photos have not been taken on my iPhone so I needed to Geo Tag my other photos myself.

In order to Geo Tag my non-iPhone photos I clicked the little “i” in the bottom of the event that had the rest of my Washington DC pictures. That brought up a window where you could do a search of known or common places in order to select one. If the location that you wanted to tag is not in the list then you can choose the “New Place” option. The New Place option brings up a search box powered by Google that populates a Google map with a drop pin to the right of it. Once you get in the general area that you want to tag your photos then you can click on the pin and drag it to any location that you wish. The other cool thing about this search feature is that you can enter exact address in it and they will show up as long as they can be found on a standard Google map.

Geo Tagging my photos is something that I never thought of doing but it is really cool to tag several groups of photos in different locations and then bring them up on the map. It is pretty cool to see all the places that you have been and zoom into those locations to see the pictures that you took.

Conclusion

After playing with these couple of features in iPhoto 09’ I am excited about the results. The Faces features makes it a whole lot easier to tag people in your photos which I previously did not do at all. The Places feature is fun to play with as it is easy to do (automatic with your iPhone) and gives you a good perspective of all the places that you visited and taken pictures.

I look forward to playing with the new iMovie as well especially since I have a family movie due that needs to get out the grandparents. A review of that should be coming soon.

Technorati Tags: iLife 09,iPhoto 09,Geo Tag,Photo Editors,Apple,Mac