iPhoto ‘09 - Overview

I have to say, I’m very impressed with iPhoto ‘09.

“Faces” has been added to iPhoto as a way to organize and tag your photos. Once you’ve started assigning names to photos, it automatically “recognizes” photos with those other people, and labels them accordingly. Facial recognition is something I’ve seen in other software, but to see it added into iLife/iPhoto is nice.

When you have a new photo or an unidentified photo, it pops up a “corkboard” that shows the faces for people you’ve already named and suggests matches for the new/unidentified photo.

“Places” has also been added as a way to organize and tag your photos. While they emphasized the geotag aspects (GPS coordinates added to a photo’s EXIF information by your camera), it’s also handy to manually do it, and it plots out your photos on maps.

They’ve also added a “Travel Books” feature where you can have books printed out with maps and photos of the places you visited or are interested.

Both of these features could end up being very useful to genealogists in the long run. I have my doubts about how accurate the facial recognition will be when it comes to older or smaller photos, but even if you have to do some manually, it seems like a good way to keep track of everything.

The New Digital Darkroom - Macworld

Since most of us have found ourselves dealing with a lot of photos, both digital and physical, Macworld has put together a really good article, The new digital darkroom, that briefly covers Adobe Lightroom, and Apple iPhoto and Aperture.

It delves into organizing and managing your photos, as well as publishing (slide shows, printing, web pages, etc.). It also looks at where Photoshop fits into the scheme of things.

HoudahGeo 1.1.5

HoudahGeo version 1.1.5 is now available. HoudahGeo is a “geocoding” application for Macs - it allows you to embed latitude, longitude and altitude information into photos (”invisibly - no impact on the photo data). The photos can then be used in combination with Google Earth

It requires Mac OS X 10.4.8 and a digital camera.

Note: HoudahGeo is normally $34.95, but until version 1.2 comes out, it’s $29.95. A 1.x license is valid with all 1.x releases.

This version corrects two issues:
- Image loading - HoudahGeo could skip images when dragged in bulk to the application.
- Camera setup - HoudahGeo 1.1.4 would crash when the camera setup was modified after having loaded images.