KEY POINTS:
While I was in Sydney a few days ago I got a good demonstration of iPhoto in iLife '09. Since then I've had a chance to check it out for myself.
Two new features are standouts. While 'only' two major new features may not seem like much, the amount of software engineering in them must be considerable. (There are other new features like Flikr and FaceBook support built in.)
For a while now, iPhoto - Apple's free-on-new-Macs image wrangler - has been organising photos into groups called Events. This is a little arbitrary (iPhoto can't read your mind quite yet) and works like this: if you shoot a batch of photos in the morning and another batch a few hours later, iPhoto assumes these belong to two separate 'events' so when you plug in your digital camera, the photos are imported into two separate events.
Of course, if you consider these two batches actually belong to the same event, you just drag one on top of the other and they merge, so it's hardly a problem. Double-clicking on an event tile opens it up to display all the pictures inside.
Once you add word tags to your pictures, it's really easy to make new albums containing images in whatever category you choose - your holiday, Aunt Sally, whatever.
However, the new version - which forms a part of the $179 iLife '09 package but which is there installed already for free on all new Macs - added two additional headings to the list on the upper left where Events appears - Faces and Places.
Faces is really clever. You just identify a few people from your collection (iPhoto can mind a quarter of-a-million photos, by the way) and the new iPhoto uses the information to go through and grab everybody else with the same face, normally scarily accurately.
I'll leave it to you tech types to work out how much coding went into this, but basically it works on the analysis of the metrics in the images - lots of modern cameras use similar ingenuity to detect faces in the frame; iPhoto takes it a few steps further.
What's cool is, if you click on Faces on the left and then on the Event of a name associated with a face, every image with that face in it appears - so if I click on Bob, there's Bob playing with his dog, Bob laying on the beach etc but also Bob in a crowd with Sue, Tamati, Mahinarangi etc - all of whom also have their own 'smart' Face events.
But the places feature is really cool too. Now the guy who showed me this at Apple in Australia, Geoff Winder, has way better holidays than I do as his snaps were from all over South America. But wow!
Apple actually put geotagging into it's free image and PDF viewer, Preview, a while ago.
This works particularly well if your camera already has a GPS feature - as the iPhone does.
When you look at a geotagged Event, putting the mouse over an image cause a little 'i' information logo to appear at the bottom right. Click on this and GPS tagged images show you a map straight away with pushpins showing the locations of all the pictures in that event, making a path, if you like, of that trip you did or holiday you had. Whatever picture is topmost in the event - you skate your mouse pointer over it to skim the stack - shows up as a blue pushpin (the others are red).
Apple is pinpointing your snaps, accurate to a few metres (I know, Obama should send Osama an iPhone ...). It's all powered by Google Maps once iPhoto has interpreted the GPS data from your camera as it imports the images. This means you can zoom in and out on this map right in the little information window that appears (yes, you need to be connected to the internet). You also, therefore, have the Google Maps Terrain, Satellite and Hybrid options for display.
If you open the event, each individual picture has it's own pushpin map showing just that location.
But, as Steve Jobs likes to say near the end of his keynote speeches, "wait, there's more."
If you click the Show in Places button in this little image dialogue, iPhoto '09 loads an entire map right into its window and lets you toggle between an image and a map view.
If you're feeling left out because your camera doesn't have a GPS (RTFD) chip, don't worry.
You can add locations, and no, I don't mean typing in latitudes and longitudes - Apple has listed lots of places in there to get you going, Not little places like Orewa, unfortunately, but Wellington, Auckland, Dunedin etc. You just start typing the name and choose the correct location from the pop-up lost that appears.
Another approach is to click on Places over under the Library on the left. A map displays showing every location that has been tagged, and clicking on the pin opens that image or event (stack of images). So if you want to just grab or view all those images from Barcelona (I wish!), there you go, how easy is that?
Now, ignorant people may rail at the price of Macs in New Zealand, but if you buy one, you get features like this thrown in. I do comprehend your jealousy. And I haven't even told you about GarageBand yet.
- Mark Webster mac.nz
