The Braseltons

My library: 25,395 photos and growing daily…

That is what I work with.  I find myself constantly looking for a good picture of [insert someone's name here].  I sift through the pictures and approximate time that I took the picture.  Sure, I have some of my pictures tagged with keywords but do you know how much of a pain that is?  Are the all tagged?  Nope.  

The feature that I was really looking forward to in iLife ‘09 is Faces in iPhoto.  It automatically finds faces in your library and has a nice interface to find them.  

Real life use?  Yea, I’m happy to have it!  That is the ultimate answer.  

After installing the new iLife software, I started up iPhoto.  There was a new Face option under Library.  

Faces and Places

The computer works for HOURS checking out all of the pictures.  Cool, I went to sleep and messed with it in the morning.  When checking in the morning, I clicked Faces and it shows a blank cork board.  Basically, go to your photos and select one.  Click Name at the bottom.

Name

The picture enlarges and all of the recognized faces are selected.  If it might know the name, it will ask if it is [insert name here].  If unknown, it says unknown.  Just type the correct name in the box.  Go to the next picture and perform the same operation.  Do that a few times and it learns the names and faces.  You can now go to the Faces portion of the library.  In there select your person and it will show the confirmed people at the top and below, the ones that it *thinks* is that person.  It’s usually pretty sketchy there.  Just go through about 10 or so of them that are CORRECT and click Done.  It will show more that it thinks is correct – it will be more accurate this time.  A few times of that  and it does pretty well.  It does take time but it’s a VERY nice feature.

The Places feature is pretty cool if you have Geo-tagged photos.  I happen to have many as the iPhone tags the photos when you take them.  It was pretty cool to see a string of pins leading from Texas to Pennsylvania!  It is pretty nifty also.

iMovie has also gained a needed face lift.  The new Project box and other effect additions make this a much better version of iMovie!  

The tutorials for learning to play piano or guitar in Garageband (the only ones included) are very nice also.  I guess that I need to hook up the keyboard (audio) that I have gathering dust.  I don’t even know which end of that thing should face up.  Maybe the tutorials can help me.

I haven’t messed with iDVD yet.  I imagine it’s the same ole thing with a few new themes.  iWeb is in the same boat.  I haven’t touched it yet.  Maybe I’ll update this later.