Justin Cox Presents:

iPhoto ’09

When iLife ’09 was announced at this years MacWorld, I was extremely excited about the new features being added to iPhoto. I even purchased a small GPS device so I could take advantage of the geotagging feature. Needless to say that when the package arrived last week, I couldn’t wait to try it out. Want to know if it’s worth the upgrade? Read on.

Faces
I’ve got to say this was a feature a long time coming. Tagging someone in the keywords of a photo is one thing, but actually tagging their face is another entirely. iPhoto ’09 allows you to do just that but takes it one better, it uses some sort of facial recognition algorithm to connect pictures based on who is in them. At least that’s the theory.

In actuality, iPhoto seems to detect about 75% of faces. This percentage is very good in my opinion. The system has no trouble at all finding faces in portraits/close ups but in candid or group shots it’s a bit spotty. If the subject is wearing a hat, glasses or even has hair in front of their face sometimes the system doesn’t recognize the face. What iPhoto doesn’t do all that well is figure out who’s in the picture.

Over the last week I’ve gone through the 10 or so years worth of pictures in my library and have tried to tag the faces of most of the pictures in there. This has resulted in nearly 150 different people, each with somewhere from 2 or 3 pictures to a whole lot. On average I’d say each ‘face’ has about 10 to 15 images. Now I don’t know if it’s because there are a lot of different people or not enough source material for each person, but I’d say iPhoto only gets about 25% of the facial recognition correct. I will say that the first person I trained iPhoto to recognize was me (is that conceited or what?) and after tagging 3 or 4 photos, it was able to find a dozen or so more and so on.

In theory the system is awesome and perhaps as I give it more input it’ll get better, but the facial recognition just isn’t quite where I’d hoped it would have been. I’m not sure if the technology behind the recognition is something that could be updated through Software Update, but it’d be interesting to see if Apple improves upon it in the future.

Places
Places is iPhoto’s implementation of geotagging — the ability to tag photos with GPS coordinates. This feature is pretty much smooth as butter — quote that. I was able to tag the few hundred events in my library in only a few short hours (it would have been quicker but I’m anal and wanted to make sure pictures taken in transit were tagged different than the rest). The result is a cool map view for each image and a very cool map showing where all of your pictures were taken.

Finding locations is pretty easy and there’s a fair amount of default locations built in — all cities and a good amount of landmarks/points of interest. Adding additional locations is just as easy and uses a Google Maps search engine. If that doesn’t find what you’re looking for, you can always just drag the pin where you want it to go.

It’ll be interesting to see how the map grows as I take more pictures with accurate GPS location information, and not just tag with the generic city location.

Online Sharing
Newly integrated into iPhoto is the ability to easily upload and share photos on Facebook and Flickr. It is a very easy process, select photos and pick which service to use. The first time you use each service you have to activate each account — it takes about 30 seconds. Once everything is up and running, sharing the photos is dead simple.

One thing I was interested in was the advertised two-way communication between iPhoto and Facebook with respect to Faces tagging. According to Apple, if you tag a face in iPhoto and upload to Facebook, it’s already tagged. Likewise, if someone tags a photo in Facebook it transmits that to iPhoto. All of this works as advertised except for one feature that you would think would be standard.

When I upload a photo that has been tagged with a face in iPhoto it does tag that photo in Facebook. However, it doesn’t determine if that name is a friend or not so it doesn’t actually link to their account. For example, I tagged a photo of me in iPhoto and when it was uploaded it was tagged but in name only. Couldn’t click on my name to view my profile, etc. It was the same with all the photos I uploaded. If I tagged them in Facebook and re-synced with iPhoto, I was given the “Is this so and so” confirmation. It seems that’s the best way to go about this. Kind of a silly extra step, but one that seems necessary for it all to work properly.

The only other glitch I found here was when I tried to delete a shared album with Flickr. It showed the progress bar, but nothing happened. I quit out and restarted iPhoto and then tried again and it worked — in iPhoto. When I pulled up Flickr the pictures were all still there. I had to delete them using Flickr’s “organize” feature. Again, a strange hassle.

Final Thoughts
So is it worth it? Well, there are some things I was disappointed in, but for the most part I’m pretty happy with iPhoto ’09. I wish the Faces technology was a bit more refined, but it’s made up for in the Places feature. I’d like to see how future updates and Apple’s infamous “bug fixes” effect iPhoto’s usability. I feel like it’s a good basis to start from and it should continue to grow from here.

iPhoto is a part of iLife ’09 and sells for $79 (or a little less through Amazon — and I get a small kickback). Over the next few days weeks I’ll go through iLife’s other apps of note, GarageBand and iMovie, and review them as well.