FAQ Added, Note-Taking Software Updated

Over the past few days, I’ve done a large update/revision of the Mac note-taking and journal software page. There was very little there before and now there is hopefully an up-to-date guide of sorts that can point you in the right direction if you are looking for information on applications to help organize and manage genealogy research. I’ll be expanding it and doing full reviews of some of the software mentioned.

More importantly, I’ve added a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) to the site, which you may have seen in the navigation menu above (“FAQ”):

Mac Genealogy FAQ

It’s going to cover a lot of the questions I receive in email and hopefully clear the air on some things. We don’t directly sell or develop genealogy software is one example of a question I get asked about a lot. The overall focus of the FAQ section is going to be on helping people who have migrated from Windows or older Macs and the genealogists migrating from Windows or older Macs section will be expanded greatly in the next few days.

There will also be FAQs for specific Mac genealogy applications and questions. Here are two examples:
* FAQ – Family Tree Maker for Mac
* FAQ – Personal Ancestral File (PAF)

I’ve got a lot left to do on it, but you can see the start of what it will be from the above links.

If there is anything you think that needs to be added or expanded, please contact us.

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.