iPhoto fun
More and more folks are buying Apple laptops as stats from the end of 2008 indicate. Apple’s laptop fleet including the MacBook, MacBook Pro 15” and 17” and the thinnest and lightest laptop the MacBook Air have vaulted into 3rd place behind corporate giants Dell and HP. Apple commands 17.6% of the market gaining 2.2% in 2008 while most of the rest of the industry struggled to maintain their existing share.
A big reason for Apple’s success has been it’s bundled iLife software package purchasers receive free with the purchase of their laptop. There are five applications in the iLife suite iPhoto, iMovie, Garageband, iWeb and iDVD. iMovie lets you import video footage from your camcorder and create mini movies on your Mac. Garageband is a music creation program that is addictive and fun even for those who don’t play a real instrument. iWeb helps you create your own website and iDVD helps you create DVD’s in minutes.
But it is iPhoto I want to concentrate on today. iPhoto all by itself is a terrific photo management tool and the latest version released in January is worth the upgrade.
Apple has realized that as Digital cameras have replaced traditional film, photographers, unburdened by rolls of 12, 24 and 36 shot film, have gone wild. Photos are stored on secure digital SD cards ranging in size from 1 GB to 32 GB mean that we have an almost endless supply of “film”. Digital photographers are taking more and more images and editing less and less. It is not uncommon for our computer hard drives to be stuffed with hundreds and perhaps thousands of photos.
This brings with it a new challenge. How do we organize these images and find what we need without spending an afternoon searching?
The latest release of iPhoto offers a couple of intriguing ideas. “Faces” incorporates face recognition software that when turned loose on our image library finds faces it thinks is the same person and offers them to you to name and sort. While not perfect, the software does learn as it goes, so after you have told it a few times that the face in question is that of your uncle Ernie it will stop presenting photos of your dog Sam as Uncle Ernie. The resemblance is an entirely other story I assure you.
Once you have tagged a few faces iPhoto groups them under a photo of the person (Uncle Ernie) that you can choose and as more are images of Ernie get added the program adds to the library of images of that person. If iPhoto finds a photo of someone it does not recognize it asks you to identify the person and starts a new file.
“Places” is another cool feature in iPhoto. This app uses longitude and latitude geocoding to group photos by the place they where taken. Many new digital cameras and cellphones use internal GPS to do the geocoding to locate and tag images. “Places” relies on Google to help with this wizardry. But just because you don’t have a new whiz-bang camera or cellphone with a GPS don’t worry, you can also add your own addresses (houses, parks, restaurants, clubs or attractions) manually to your ever-expanding list.
iPhoto has also improved its integration with online photo services like Flickr and Facebook with direct uploading features. It also adds to its already powerful photo editing capabilities and adds wonderful new slideshow themes, templates and transitions.
iPhoto is just on of many reasons Apple has enjoyed an increase in market share and should be on your list when it comes time to purchase a new computer.
A big reason for Apple’s success has been it’s bundled iLife software package purchasers receive free with the purchase of their laptop. There are five applications in the iLife suite iPhoto, iMovie, Garageband, iWeb and iDVD. iMovie lets you import video footage from your camcorder and create mini movies on your Mac. Garageband is a music creation program that is addictive and fun even for those who don’t play a real instrument. iWeb helps you create your own website and iDVD helps you create DVD’s in minutes.
But it is iPhoto I want to concentrate on today. iPhoto all by itself is a terrific photo management tool and the latest version released in January is worth the upgrade.
Apple has realized that as Digital cameras have replaced traditional film, photographers, unburdened by rolls of 12, 24 and 36 shot film, have gone wild. Photos are stored on secure digital SD cards ranging in size from 1 GB to 32 GB mean that we have an almost endless supply of “film”. Digital photographers are taking more and more images and editing less and less. It is not uncommon for our computer hard drives to be stuffed with hundreds and perhaps thousands of photos.
This brings with it a new challenge. How do we organize these images and find what we need without spending an afternoon searching?
The latest release of iPhoto offers a couple of intriguing ideas. “Faces” incorporates face recognition software that when turned loose on our image library finds faces it thinks is the same person and offers them to you to name and sort. While not perfect, the software does learn as it goes, so after you have told it a few times that the face in question is that of your uncle Ernie it will stop presenting photos of your dog Sam as Uncle Ernie. The resemblance is an entirely other story I assure you.
Once you have tagged a few faces iPhoto groups them under a photo of the person (Uncle Ernie) that you can choose and as more are images of Ernie get added the program adds to the library of images of that person. If iPhoto finds a photo of someone it does not recognize it asks you to identify the person and starts a new file.
“Places” is another cool feature in iPhoto. This app uses longitude and latitude geocoding to group photos by the place they where taken. Many new digital cameras and cellphones use internal GPS to do the geocoding to locate and tag images. “Places” relies on Google to help with this wizardry. But just because you don’t have a new whiz-bang camera or cellphone with a GPS don’t worry, you can also add your own addresses (houses, parks, restaurants, clubs or attractions) manually to your ever-expanding list.
iPhoto has also improved its integration with online photo services like Flickr and Facebook with direct uploading features. It also adds to its already powerful photo editing capabilities and adds wonderful new slideshow themes, templates and transitions.
iPhoto is just on of many reasons Apple has enjoyed an increase in market share and should be on your list when it comes time to purchase a new computer.
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