Photography, Tutorials

iPhoto ‘09 is here!

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ilife09

My copy of iPhoto’09 is finally here.

Apologies to Windows users, you can skip this post, it’s Mac specific.

 My favorite Fedex gal just dropped it off. 

Most of my “stuff” comes via UPS or Fedex.

I’m backing up my iPhoto library to another volume before I install it.

Never upgrade without doing backing up.


Okay, I’ve safely copied my iPhoto library. 

And before you install, here are the requirements:

Hardware
Mac computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5, or PowerPC G4 (867MHz or faster) processor. 
iMovie requires an Intel-based Mac, Power Mac G5 (dual 2.0GHz or faster), or iMac G5 (1.9GHz or faster)
GarageBand Learn to Play requires an Intel-based Mac with a dual-core processor or better.
512MB of RAM; 1GB recommended. High-definition video requires at least 1GB of RAM.
4GB of disk space
DVD drive for installation
Software
Mac OS X 10.5.6 or later
QuickTime 7.5.5 or later (included)

Installation

iphoto_warningAfter iLife 09 installs, and you click on iPhoto, you’ll get a warning that says if you proceed, your library can’t be opened by the previous version of iPhoto.

Since I backed up, I proceeded. When iPhoto launches, it goes through your Library.

 

iphoto_3faces

Mine took at least 2 hours and my library is about 30GB.

Just plan on leaving it running while you do something else.

You might be surprised that I use iPhoto.

Well, I use it for my personal pictures because I feel it’s robust enough.

And when it comes to sharing pictures with friends and family, I feel there is no easier way.

Sure I can upload a zipped folder to my webserver, post the URL and send it to my recipients but that’s not as pretty or simple or impressive.

Just ask my sister-in-law who recently bought an iMac. She’s been using iPhoto 08 to create and share webpages. Her Windows using friends are in awe.

If you’re interested, I check out my tutorials with videos on the right sidebar “My Mac Tutorials.” 

So the highly touted new features are “Faces” and “Places.” Doesn’t that remind you of an this Beatles’ song “In My Life”?

If you’re like inquisitive, curious like me, you must be wondering if “Faces” will be tripped up by:

  •  Pictures of people who occasionally wears glasses or sunglasses
  • Appearance changes due to good old Father Time 

Yep, those are the 2 biggies I’m dying to see. My mind is going into overdrive here thinking about what facial recognition might be able to do. 

As for Places, I’m not exactly dying to let people know where exactly I took some of my pictures. I mean sure I like to share and all but there is a matter of privacy too.

Or how about if I have a secret location which I don’t necessarily want to let everyone in  on? Just kidding..

iphoto09_gabe1Check back here soon. I’ll fill you in after I’ve had a chance to play around with this latest version. 

I’ll be doing a demonstration on this for the local Mac User group‘s next meeting. If you’re in the area, you’re welcome to attend and best of all, it’s absolutely free. Meet other Mac users at the same time.

Moving along… I selected the Faces pane and then a picture of my son Gabriel.

After iPhoto went through the paces, I was presented with a picture of him on a corkboard.

iphoto09_gabe2When I selected “gabriel” iPhoto tells me “gabriel may also be in the photos below.” 

I guess that’s where I’ll have to go in and fine-tune its sorting process.

Obviously iPhoto can’t be expected to get just pictures of Gabriel.

I’ll look for pictures of him before he got glasses next.

iphotoscreensnapz0052

Even with those errors, I think I can live that. I’m certain as with most software, the next versions will prove to be more and more accurate. 

Kind of like dictation software. Remember how you used to have to read and continually train the application?

For a 1st impression, this is promising. Adding keywords is easy but this is another tool which will definitely make life easier for me.

 

2 thoughts on “iPhoto ‘09 is here!”

  1. Mikael,
    Thanks for stopping in. When I looked at the specs that Apple suggested, it appear iPhoto 09 is very processor intensive. After all, it being asked to look through your whole library to find “similarities” on-the-fly.

    It does make sense for you to first define who is who. Then after Faces catalogs images according to its best guess, you get to go in and fine-tune.

    How big was your iPhoto library anyways?

    So far I’ve figured out that Faces has a hard time with profiles (when the whole front of a face can be seen).

    Curiously when I setting up and I told Faces, this is a picture of Peter, it also brought up pictures of my brother and my father (from an old picture when he was young)

    There is a function where you can fine-tune Faces by manually telling it who is correctly identified.

    I’ll be sure to post a follow-up when I’ve done more testing in the next few days. Subscribe to my blog to stay in touch.

  2. I installed iLife 09 on my iBook G4 with maxed out RAM and a huge harddrive.
    Since I’d never had iPhoto on my iBook before I imported all my 4000 photos from my PC which took a little more than 5 hours over the wifi lan.
    When done, I clicked Photos in the left pane, selected a picture of my self and hit “Faces”. A button down left said something like “handle undefined faces” (I run Swedish) so I clicked that and a square popped up in the middle of the picture telling me to place it over the face I wanted to define. What? I thought. Isn’t it supposed to find faces by it self?

    How’s this supposed to work exactly? Might it be because I run on a powerPC and not an intel processor?

    Well, I’ll know as soon as my shily 17″ Macbook Pro arrives 😛

    Peace out!

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