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Early iLife '09 Notes and Impressions

Amazing!!!

iMovie is great, the effects particularly the speed up and slow down stuff is awesome. Especially becasue once it is in iMovie the effects do not have to render!

Iphoto faces worked well for me. I am 30 and it found pictures of me when I was 12!!!
 
iphoto

So far faces works pretty well. No where near perfect, but I was never expecting such. Had an error message last night about a server connection failure when testing out Places so I'll have to try again today after work.

My only problem with this version of iPhoto is that I can't seem to be able to view pictures in a separate window. It seems that the only options are to view in main window, or in full screen. It's not that big of a deal, and I am probably (hopefully) overlooking where the option is located.
 
stevegut78 said:
Here's another CONFIRMED successful test:

iPhoto 09 was able to tag and identify my previous 3 girlfriends breasts!

LOL
Click to expand...

Pics or it didnt happen.



On the other note : iPhoto has serious problems.

1.Wiggy browsing = When you choose few pictures in the Library mode and try to scroll down (alubook),you can scroll a bit down but the the program automatically throws you up to the first pic.
So in short,if you try to choose pictures from the library that spans several screens, when you get down a bit,it throws you back to the first pics.

FAIL.

2. When you choose pictures over several days (holding down shift) it chooses ALL the pictures from the last day.
Say,you have 5 pics on january 16th,and you want to erase them all.
Then you have 1433 pictures on january 17th and only want to erase only the first one. Nope.
It automatically selects ALL the pictures in the jan 17th allso.
Be a bit unattentative and everything is gone.

ÜBERFAIL!

Like,Gerge W. Bush sized fail.
 
I bought iLife 09 only for iPhoto and I am fairly disappointed. I am now reverting back to iLife 08. The reasons are that faces and places do not work as I imagined and I can't use Keyword Manager....I believe that the new iPhoto Tags should be keywords but instead they use a new database...That is inconsistent. Other issues I see:
  • With keywords I can assign for example a keyword for a friend, even if his/her face isnt shown in the picture (for example playing tennis soccer, etc). With faces I cant do that
  • The Places database is flawed. I live in Mannheim and iPhoto refuses to accept it as a city!!!
  • You cannot group contacts together. I would like to have a folder for my family, another for friends, etc
  • I cannot use faces for my dog...There is no point in using faces for some things and for others to use keywords. It is inconsistent

I am disappointed :(
 
Small White Car said:
Yeah, I had something similar happen to me!
Click to expand...

I found it funny when I started doing the 'Faces' for me and a few Ken dolls came up... yah sure they looked like me but wow, that's pretty neat.

I will say this. IMO it works pretty damn good. You go through and fine tune the algo and it picks up quite a bit. It's not 100% perfect, if it were, it would probably cost more than 79 bucks.

It did (this I found very kewl and why I am not complaining one bit) when I was doing pictures of my dad (who's in his early 60's) tagged a blurry picture of him from high school (old black and white photo) in a picture where the focus was my sister and her baby. The picture of him was on a fireplace mantle, the photo was actually pretty dark, so his picture actually stood out a small bit, but it recognized the facial features and said "Is this XXX XXXXXX" and I was like "HOLY SHET!"

So all in all, I'm pretty pleased with it. It even brought up some pictures of relatives who 'resembled' other family members when tagging them, which makes sense during the fine tuning process since often many family members do contain some similar facial features especially siblings.

All in all, good job Apple. I'm sure we'll see updates in the future, but for an initial release, I'm pretty pleased.

zcor said:
I advise you to go through the whole face recognition stage without loved ones nearby. iPhoto has a rather rude way of telling you your ex-girlfriends look just like the new one.
Click to expand...

or ex-wife... glad I'm doing this now rather than when she's home :eek:
 
if i am playing a slideshow on the new iphoto how do i save the slideshow? I would like to send to my iPhone or just save it within iphoto

edit: actually i figured it out. Although it would be easyer if we could save it directly from the instant slideshow i made. Rather than press create slideshow first
 
rstretch said:
Can somebody who has got a retail dvd of iLife '09 please confirm whether there is the DVD contains a file named as follows:

Read Before You Install iLife.app

This file poses as an .rtf but is actually an application. I see no reason why Apple would have chosen to put their readme file in application format.

Cheers.
Click to expand...

Then you fail to see the bigger picture. It's done that way to open the 'proper' rft file (which IS enclosed in the resources) in the native language of your system.

Dig deeper and you'll see it's fine.

It's natural to feel this way especially if you downloaded the torrent version (shame on you!) and I've seen the EXACT almost word for word question possed on torrent sites. But the actual disk does contain the same thing. So does iWork '08, '09, and iLife '08.
 
Podcasting

Has there been a big update to GarageBand? I'm not interested in the music/lessons part of it, just the podcasting aspect. I already have iLife 08 and was wondering if I should get 09 just for the podcasting.
 
kkat69 said:
Then you fail to see the bigger picture. It's done that way to open the 'proper' rft file (which IS enclosed in the resources) in the native language of your system.

Dig deeper and you'll see it's fine.

It's natural to feel this way especially if you downloaded the torrent version (shame on you!) and I've seen the EXACT almost word for word question possed on torrent sites. But the actual disk does contain the same thing. So does iWork '08, '09, and iLife '08.
Click to expand...

Yup, they do the same thing on the OS X disk as well. Except its doctored to look like a PDF.
 
Keywords

I'm with petvas. I spent days adding keywords (mostly names and places) to my photos in iPhoto '08 and never quite finished the project. I was hoping that iPhoto '09 would easily finish the task, but instead I've come to find that all of my keywords are now gone. I do have my iPhoto library backed up and I could switch back, but I've already spent more time than I would like with Faces.

That said, iPhoto '09 does make use of keywords (⌘k)--it's just unfortunate to have to go through everything again. So those of us, silly Americans or not can at least find our pets via keywords.
 
Chris Grande said:
Yup, they do the same thing on the OS X disk as well. Except its doctored to look like a PDF.
Click to expand...

Yup, I believe all of their big packages are done this way, and not really 'doctored' per say, just the icon is more familiar to end users, not like they need to see the pkg icon for a "Read me before installing" or to have it say "Run me before installing".
 
leelee81 said:
I'm with petvas. I spent days adding keywords (mostly names and places) to my photos in iPhoto '08 and never quite finished the project. I was hoping that iPhoto '09 would easily finish the task, but instead I've come to find that all of my keywords are now gone. I do have my iPhoto library backed up and I could switch back, but I've already spent more time than I would like with Faces.

That said, iPhoto '09 does make use of keywords (⌘k)--it's just unfortunate to have to go through everything again. So those of us, silly Americans or not can at least find our pets via keywords.
Click to expand...

I would stay with iPhoto 09 but I have many pictures where you cant really see the faces of people, you see them from the side (for example dancing). I need to be able to tag them too and the only way to do it right is to assign a keyword...When Keyword Manager becomes available for iPhoto 09, I will upgrade but till then I will be using iPhoto 08...
I wont be using the faces and places feature..It is still incomplete
 
petvas said:
I would stay with iPhoto 09 but I have many pictures where you cant really see the faces of people, you see them from the side (for example dancing). I need to be able to tag them too and the only way to do it right is to assign a keyword...When Keyword Manager becomes available for iPhoto 09, I will upgrade but till then I will be using iPhoto 08...
I wont be using the faces and places feature..It is still incomplete
Click to expand...

It didn't do a good job importing previous keywords already assigned to photos, but I did notice my keyword manager in '09 my keywords (most if not all) where already there. I just had to retag the photo with the keywords.

I did redo a few smart albums already based on keywords. So for me it's still plenty good.
 
petvas said:
I would stay with iPhoto 09 but I have many pictures where you cant really see the faces of people, you see them from the side (for example dancing). I need to be able to tag them too and the only way to do it right is to assign a keyword...When Keyword Manager becomes available for iPhoto 09, I will upgrade but till then I will be using iPhoto 08...
I wont be using the faces and places feature..It is still incomplete
Click to expand...

You can manually add "Faces" selection areas to any part of a photo for side shots or pets or anything else you want to track.
 
New iWeb allows incremental changes when publishing to a folder. This is great news (albeit to a small proportion of users).

Widgets have just moved into the media pane which is now part of the main window. Means you cant keep your media window under the inspector any more.

Can't really see any other changes, which is a bit sad.

Haven't tried the other apps yet but iMovie sounds the most exciting - all the features that made iMovie HD such fun with the fast workflow of the new iMovie.

I wonder if you can print multiple photos without wasting paper in iPhoto again (like you used to in v3 or something)?
 
BaldiMac said:
You can manually add "Faces" selection areas to any part of a photo for side shots or pets or anything else you want to track.
Click to expand...

I am aware of that but adding someones back as a "face" seems to be strange..Keywords work better for me. I am not saying that I dont want to use iPhoto 09, I will just wait till Keyword Manager works with it
 
petvas said:
I bought iLife 09 only for iPhoto and I am fairly disappointed. I am now reverting back to iLife 08. The reasons are that faces and places do not work as I imagined and I can't use Keyword Manager....I believe that the new iPhoto Tags should be keywords but instead they use a new database...That is inconsistent. Other issues I see:
  • With keywords I can assign for example a keyword for a friend, even if his/her face isnt shown in the picture (for example playing tennis soccer, etc). With faces I cant do that
  • The Places database is flawed. I live in Mannheim and iPhoto refuses to accept it as a city!!!
  • You cannot group contacts together. I would like to have a folder for my family, another for friends, etc
  • I cannot use faces for my dog...There is no point in using faces for some things and for others to use keywords. It is inconsistent

I am disappointed :(
Click to expand...

Why revert, though?
 
I just installed the new iLife package today. iPhoto and GarageBand seem to have updated fine and are working, but iMovie and iWeb are still coming up as the '08 version. Not sure why yet. Has anyone else had a similar experience? :confused:
 
iPhoto Places

there is a widespread problem with places regarding the internet connection. When you are using any mobile service like a HSDPA USB modem, iphoto will insist telling you that you cannot use places because you are not connected to the internet, which is not trues because all internet related services are running well.:mad:
 
I really like the faces feature. It is soooo addictive. I stayed up way too late last night going through them and confirming/changing the suggestions.

I think the best way to attack it is to first tag the people that occur most often in your pictures. First, this lets the algorithm learn such that it will knock out big chunks of the faces it has detected. Second, since it has learned these, it won't incorrectly identify these faces later. Then, start working your way through people who appear in your pictures less frequently.

Do this iteratively by browsing via the faces feature, select the person you want to find in pictures, and then let it suggest faces for you to approve/correct. If you see the algorithm getting a couple of the faces mixed up routinely, it might be good to go positively confirm several pics of each of those people such that it can figure out distinctions between them.

I don't know what percentage it is getting faces correct, but it is better than I thought it would work. What would be nice is if it gave a couple of the top ranked people that it thought the face is and then let you select which person it is from a drop down or something. As it is, when it gets a face wrong you have to click on the "X" and start typing the correct name in (which isn't bad, but is an extra step).
 
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