iPhoto ‘09 - Using Faces, Places and Facebook
From MacLife, May 09 pages 24 and 26
(submitted by Del)
iPhoto uses facial recognition to organize our photos based on who’s in them. With an Event or album selected, you click the new Name button in the toolbar to get started, iPhoto looks for faces in your photos, and you type in the name of each unknown face to “teach” the app to recognize your friends and loved ones. If it misses or selects wrong ones, you can draw frames around faces it misses or people who are facing away from the camera and tag them manually.
Everyone you’ve tagged appears on the corkboard when you click Faces in the sidebar--click them to see all he photos you tagged of that person, along with iPhoto’s best guesses for what other photos they appear in, then click the Confirm Name button and either confirm or reject each guess. The more you tag and confirm, the more dead-on the guesses get.
The other big feature, Places, uses the latitude and longitude data recorded by GPS-equipped cameras (including the iPhone) to plot your photos on a map, so you can find images based on where they were taken. If you’re not into zooming and panning around the map to find your locations, a button in the toolbar lets you switch to List view, where your photos are sorted by country, state, city, and then landmark.
If your camera doesn’t geotag your photos automatically, you can add the locations yourself by clicking the little i button in a photo’s lower-left corner to flip it over. As you type a location, iPhoto gives you a list of preloaded cities and points of interest. or you can add a new location (even looking them up by street address) and drop a pin to mark it. And if you want to edit the landmark for a geotagged photo-just click the same little i and make your corrections.
Two new buttons in the iPhoto ‘09 toolbar let you upload images to Facebook (with the suppot for Faces tags) and Flickr (with the support of geotagging). Unfortunately, both are step backward from third-party plug-ins that already exist. We vastly prefer the Facebook Uploader for iPhoto (free, developers.facebook.com/iphoto), a free plugin for iPhoto ‘06 and ‘08 that still works with iPoto ‘09. That plug-in lets you upload photos to any of your existing Facebook photo albums or create a new one, and gives you a chance to add a captions or tag our friends before uploading.
While the built-in Facebook option in iPhoto ‘09 carries your Face’s tags over automatically, you can’t add captions (and it does’t grab your descriptions), and a new Facebook album is created with the same name as the Event or iPhoto album you’re uploading from. This is because iPhoto keeps a link between the two, so if your friend tags someone in the photo on facebook, that identity is synced back to your image in iPhoto. If you move the photo to another Facebook album, the link breaks. One way to at least keep all your iPhoto-to-Facebook iages in one Facebook album is to upload them from a “Facebook pics” album within iPhoto, but the plug-in is way more flexible.
The built-in Flickr uploading also lacks options available in existing third-party plug-ins for previous versions of iPhoto. Again, photos are added to a new seet with the same name as the Event or album you’re uploading from, and the only thing you can specify is who’s allowed to view your photos. Location data is uploaded if you check a bocx in iPhoto > Preferences > Web. the album is kept synced bwtween Flickr and iPhoto, but if you want to add captions, you’ve got to do it in Flickr. The Free Flickr exporter iPhoto Plugin (free, www.dustin.li) doesn’t support iPhoto ‘09 but we got iP2F ($14.95, www.tagtraum.com) and FlickrExport (connectedflow.com -pay a fee) both working with it even without “official” support.
