iPhoto 09 opinion and bug found!
iPhoto 09
This has been one of the most hyped apps from the new applications that Apple released and also has received most of the attention in the coding department too (except for maybe iMovie?), with some new features added that seem that they could be generally useful for most people. Needless to say I was curious and so I launched this first in order to take a look.
After first launch, a dialogue pops up informing you that you current library needs to be converted to the new format, I'm making the assumption that this allows it to add the new meta-tags for faces and places. The library conversion took only a couple of minutes for me on a library with around 7000 photos, once done the faces process starts running in the background and scanning your photos, this can take a good while though, so you may want to run it overnight or when you dont need your computer for a while. In my case, it told me that it would take almost 2 hours and in reality it took around an hour and 45 minutes, so pretty close.
I was actually watching TV while it was working and so I didnt notice at first that it had finished and initially I thought that it may have bombed out, especially when I clicked on the faces option in the lefthand menu and didn't see anything other than a screen telling me to click here to scan for faces. I had made the assumption that it would basically present me with a list of faces that I would have to go through and name, which it doesnt do.
Instead what you need to do is to go into your photo library and open up any of your photos with people in, you should see a box around their face with unknown person or something similar in it, if you edit this box and enter the person's name, that info will be saved by iphoto and a "polaroid" of the person will be added to the faces section.
If you go to the faces section and double-click on the polaroid to open it, you'll see the photo that you have already identified and below it a list of photos (in some cases repeating, i.e. the same photo is shown numerous times) that iPhoto thinks contains the person that you have already identified. Its enough then to click on the "confirm name" icon in the lower left of the interface and then to click on the photos that contain the person youre identifying.
A couple of note about this though from my experience, iPhoto will get better the more you teach it, so at the start you may have to confirm around 30 photos before you start getting good results. In practise iPhoto wasnt too bad at this, for example with my daughter who is 14 months old now, it correctly listed around 90% of the photos for her, with a mix of my photos and my wifes photos thrown in as well. You could argue here that the program is being quite clever as theoretically our daughter should have traits from both us, so it was initially quite impressive. When I went a bit further through the photos though, I found a couple of bald men listed, one from my daughters swim class who is one of the fathers and the other one of my bosses from work. Admittedly though you could say that the baldness makes them look like babies
so it wasnt too bad at this stage.
Later on though, when I was working on photos of other family
members the results were quite varied, sometimes it would be quite
close and accurate, other times it would offer a mix of males and
females as possible candidates for a match against my
father-in-laws picture, so results do vary. It also seemed to need
a helping hand with some profile shots of people, on the otherhand,
it impressed me how well it recognised people in blurry,
under-exposed or whose faces were partially covered. In short I
would say that this feature reminds me a lot of dictation software
in that it generally works quite well and can do some amazing
things but there is just a little way for it to go yet. For a first
attempt though it is pretty good.
I did come across one bug at the moment, when you enter foreign characters for a persons name (in my case Czech characters), the characters display correctly while in the iphoto library but when you go to the faces corkboard, the characters display in a different font than the rest of the name due to the use of a comic-sans type font that doesnt support them. Im making the assumption here based on experience from dealing with this problem at work a lot that this is going to also affect a lot of the other European countries too. Once I have time I want to take a look at this and see if I cant find a way to change the font for example, if I find anything then I will post it here.
One of the other new features in iPhoto is places, which is quite a nice way of grouping your photos and also putting them into context. I dont have a GPS on my camera or my computer, so most of my current photos dont contain location information, luckily though you can add this information into photos manually and for places that you use a lot, you can also store them so that they become part of the default list. For example I needed to add a lot of Czech place names which were not by default included in the list that pops up when you start entering a name, if you go into the options though, you can search for the location ala google maps and then afterwards save it. There were a couple of hiccoughs here though, as the software initially put Parga (Greece) inland when its a costal town (though looking on the map it seemed that Parga could have been made up of a few districts or something similar so it may be just my ignorance here as opposed to the program. Most of the other, more common places went without issue though and I was able to add London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Ghent and even some smaller towns like my parents town in England and the town in the Czech Republic where we are building our house without issue. There were some photos that I took of my wife and the building site with my iphone that places insisted were in the middle of the North Atlantic ocean I was able to amend these and fix
the location but I guess it will continue to do so until Apple
releases Czech localisation for the iphone.
This has been one of the most hyped apps from the new applications that Apple released and also has received most of the attention in the coding department too (except for maybe iMovie?), with some new features added that seem that they could be generally useful for most people. Needless to say I was curious and so I launched this first in order to take a look.
After first launch, a dialogue pops up informing you that you current library needs to be converted to the new format, I'm making the assumption that this allows it to add the new meta-tags for faces and places. The library conversion took only a couple of minutes for me on a library with around 7000 photos, once done the faces process starts running in the background and scanning your photos, this can take a good while though, so you may want to run it overnight or when you dont need your computer for a while. In my case, it told me that it would take almost 2 hours and in reality it took around an hour and 45 minutes, so pretty close.
I was actually watching TV while it was working and so I didnt notice at first that it had finished and initially I thought that it may have bombed out, especially when I clicked on the faces option in the lefthand menu and didn't see anything other than a screen telling me to click here to scan for faces. I had made the assumption that it would basically present me with a list of faces that I would have to go through and name, which it doesnt do.
Instead what you need to do is to go into your photo library and open up any of your photos with people in, you should see a box around their face with unknown person or something similar in it, if you edit this box and enter the person's name, that info will be saved by iphoto and a "polaroid" of the person will be added to the faces section.
If you go to the faces section and double-click on the polaroid to open it, you'll see the photo that you have already identified and below it a list of photos (in some cases repeating, i.e. the same photo is shown numerous times) that iPhoto thinks contains the person that you have already identified. Its enough then to click on the "confirm name" icon in the lower left of the interface and then to click on the photos that contain the person youre identifying.
A couple of note about this though from my experience, iPhoto will get better the more you teach it, so at the start you may have to confirm around 30 photos before you start getting good results. In practise iPhoto wasnt too bad at this, for example with my daughter who is 14 months old now, it correctly listed around 90% of the photos for her, with a mix of my photos and my wifes photos thrown in as well. You could argue here that the program is being quite clever as theoretically our daughter should have traits from both us, so it was initially quite impressive. When I went a bit further through the photos though, I found a couple of bald men listed, one from my daughters swim class who is one of the fathers and the other one of my bosses from work. Admittedly though you could say that the baldness makes them look like babies
so it wasnt too bad at this stage.
Later on though, when I was working on photos of other family
members the results were quite varied, sometimes it would be quite
close and accurate, other times it would offer a mix of males and
females as possible candidates for a match against my
father-in-laws picture, so results do vary. It also seemed to need
a helping hand with some profile shots of people, on the otherhand,
it impressed me how well it recognised people in blurry,
under-exposed or whose faces were partially covered. In short I
would say that this feature reminds me a lot of dictation software
in that it generally works quite well and can do some amazing
things but there is just a little way for it to go yet. For a first
attempt though it is pretty good.I did come across one bug at the moment, when you enter foreign characters for a persons name (in my case Czech characters), the characters display correctly while in the iphoto library but when you go to the faces corkboard, the characters display in a different font than the rest of the name due to the use of a comic-sans type font that doesnt support them. Im making the assumption here based on experience from dealing with this problem at work a lot that this is going to also affect a lot of the other European countries too. Once I have time I want to take a look at this and see if I cant find a way to change the font for example, if I find anything then I will post it here.
One of the other new features in iPhoto is places, which is quite a nice way of grouping your photos and also putting them into context. I dont have a GPS on my camera or my computer, so most of my current photos dont contain location information, luckily though you can add this information into photos manually and for places that you use a lot, you can also store them so that they become part of the default list. For example I needed to add a lot of Czech place names which were not by default included in the list that pops up when you start entering a name, if you go into the options though, you can search for the location ala google maps and then afterwards save it. There were a couple of hiccoughs here though, as the software initially put Parga (Greece) inland when its a costal town (though looking on the map it seemed that Parga could have been made up of a few districts or something similar so it may be just my ignorance here as opposed to the program. Most of the other, more common places went without issue though and I was able to add London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Ghent and even some smaller towns like my parents town in England and the town in the Czech Republic where we are building our house without issue. There were some photos that I took of my wife and the building site with my iphone that places insisted were in the middle of the North Atlantic ocean
I was able to amend these and fix
the location but I guess it will continue to do so until Apple
releases Czech localisation for the iphone.