Upgraded to iPhoto ’09
I’ve upgraded the laptop and desktop to iPhoto ’09 (yay for family plans.) So far I like:
- “Do not copy files to iPhoto library” checkbox: I don’t know if that was there in ’08 or not, but was always a pet peeve of mine about iPhoto. I manage my photos via the file system first. (I need a good way to keep them in sync though…)
- GPS/Map integration: pretty straightforward to tag locations, although I hit a strange bug where it thought I was not connected to the Internet even though I clearly was and could search for locations just fine.
- Faces: This has failed for me so far… crashed when I tried to do it on my laptop; I haven’t yet tried again to do on my desktop machine. The way you have to train it is a little funky.
- Send to Facebook: I’m not sure from the UI what this really does. I think you can only send an event to Facebook instead of just a couple selected photos in the event. That would be a strange choice though, so it can’t be right. Will have to try it out. [Update: Tried it. It does just send the selected photos, not the whole event.]
So far, it was a worthwhile upgrade from the previous version. Though if you aren’t going to use the Faces or GPS/Locations features, I wouldn’t bother.
Update: Faces works just OK out of the box; it takes a fair amount of training to really start accurately tagging faces correctly without help. Interestingly it seems to think I look a lot like my father and my friend, Kristian, as it keeps trying to tag me as them. It also doesn’t seem to do well with children as it has yet to suggest her name on her face — even after 20+ photos manually tagged (faced?) with her.
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