What's new in iPhoto 8.0.2
Last week, Apple released iLife updates with typically terse descriptions. Dissatisfied with "...overall application stability improvements," I explored iPhoto 8.0.2 for obvious changes. Here's what I found.First, Faces offers Address Book contacts as potential matches for unrecognized faces (based on initial letter), each labeled with an Address Book icon. Formerly, you'd be presented with the names of previously identified faces only.
Also, the label that identifies an unknown face has been changed from "unknown face" to "unidentified."
This one could be just in my head, but zooming in on the Places map with a double-click seems a lot faster now.
They're minor changes, but definitely welcome. Many people dismiss iPhoto, but as a snapshot professional, I love it.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Ben Treston said 9:46AM on 3-30-2009
You can also now use multi-touch on the Maps in Places as well, which is great - I really hated not having it there before, makes it much easier to zoom in on where you are looking etc.
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Jose said 9:41AM on 3-30-2009
You can also use peoples Face's to make smart playlists now. It was a huge omission before, and it kind of annoyed me that it didnt let me do that, so thats how I remember it wasnt there. But now, it is.
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nbidgood said 10:08AM on 3-30-2009
And a very useful feature is that you can now create a smart album that with the single condition:
Face -- is -- unnamed
This will capture any photo with at least one unnamed face, helping you assign names to all your Faces.
William said 10:55AM on 3-30-2009
@nbidgood:
Thank you!! I've been trying to figure this out forever! [well, since iPhoto '09 came out]
Jesse David Hollington said 12:30PM on 3-30-2009
Actually, you could do this before, but the criteria was called "Name" rather than "Face" so it was far less obvious. I can't remember if a drop-down list of existing names was provided previously for the "is" criteria -- I think you just had to type in a name manually.
Trane said 7:36PM on 3-30-2009
Jesse -
Actually, you couldn't do this before. I just tested to verify my info before installing the update. :)
Originally, you could do "Name" "does not contain" "" (empty) and you would get every photo that has no named faces. These photos could contain no detected or selected faces, or they could contain faces without names, but they absolutely could not contain even one face with a name. It really really hurt when iPhoto would misunderstand a click while naming faces and the photo would get cast into the la-la land of photos with a mix of named and unnamed faces. You would be left with no way to find these unnamed faces in photos together with named faces other than hunt and peck.
This seems to be changed in the update in a couple ways.
First, immediately after update if you edit a smart album with the old rule I named above, it has changed "Name" to "Face". That doesn't seem special, and really isn't. What has really changed is that this pattern now finds absolutely every photo. Well... that's kind of worthless and a little annoying. I liked being able to find photos with no detected faces.
The trade-off is that now I can change it to "Face" "is" "unnamed" and suddenly it finds all of those pictures with unnamed faces mixed with named faces as well as those with no named faces. I'd call that an improvement.
Hawkman said 9:47AM on 3-30-2009
Big problem for me is that you don't seem to be able to delete places you've added now. I've properly geotagged some photos, but they all still show up under a marker with giant coverage I'd added before. And yes, I refreshed the location data, and there weren't any other photos with that location assigned. :(
In a similar vein, iPhoto seems intent on adding as many duplicate places to its database as it can... I played for 10 minutes, trying to assign half a dozen photos to the same spot using the Search On Map feature, and I now have about 10 identical entries for York University. Awesome...
I was so excited about the Places feature, and it's just been a massive disappointment. It's passable for accurately geocoded photos, but completely unusable otherwise (bar getting them assigned within about 5 miles of where they're actually taken, which isn't too great). I can't understand how it's possible to screw this up so badly.
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Hawkman said 9:52AM on 3-30-2009
Oh, and PS - the new update keeps giving me horrible video corruption issues when I'm editing in full screen mode on my brand new MacBook. Turns bright red and looks like a horribly over-compressed video. Uncool.
And are the fades between photos in editing mode new? They're time consuming and really, really stuttery on my not-exactly-underpowered computer...
Yeah, I've got lots of complaints. Seems like quality control was kinda low with iPhoto '09.
nbidgood said 10:03AM on 3-30-2009
Under the "Window" menu, select "Manage My Places". This allows you to see all the Places you've added, as well as rename and/or relocate them. Hope that helps.
I feel your pain with the overall disappointment, though. When I first got iPhoto 8, I spent many hours assigning places to almost my entire library. Then, just before last weeks update, I noticed that the location info had vanished from about 2/3 of my library. Luckily, I restore back to a good library from Time Machine, but I had to reimport all the photos I had added since iPhoto decided to undo my work.
I hope this update has worked out these serious bugs. Overall, I love the new Faces & Places features.
kaslings said 6:29PM on 3-30-2009
Hawkman, thanks for posting those problems, I thought I was the only person not happy with 09. I've found it to be very buggy as well, especially with the video artifacts you mentioned.
Has anyone else noticed importing a big batch of photos takes forever with the recognition, now too? My library is about 13,000 photos, and I imported about 100 photos in two batches this weekend. the first went in fine, but the little thinking icon next to the Faces category spun for HOURS on end, and wouldn't let me import the second batch of 100 photos.
I finally had to force quit iPhoto, launch it again, watch it crash and burn, then launch again and have it work.
Hawkman said 10:38AM on 3-30-2009
Ooh, excellent. I'm sure that used to show when adding places manually? – thought it had disappeared. Thanks, that does help a bit. I feel like there are some serious problems with the implementation, though. I just want to be able to mark each photo in a specific point on a map, and group them into logical areas... without being left with a lot of mess to clean up!
I bet you were glad of Time Machine! Incredible screw-up for iPhoto there.
Tariq said 1:12PM on 3-30-2009
About iPhoto showing a whole bunch of duplicate Places when you search for York University; it uses Google Maps to search, and Google's database has a lot of duplicates, especially for universities (often times it has a different entry for each building because they have different addresses). It does the same thing when I added Stanford University.
Trane said 4:16PM on 3-30-2009
I frequently manually tag locations down to areas as small as a five foot radius. Just click the edge of the circle and shrink it to where you want, then zoom in on the map and shrink it some more. It's pretty sweet how exact you can get when using the satellite maps to fine tune your location.
Hawkman said 5:50PM on 3-30-2009
My problem really was trying to accurately position each photo using iPhoto. Not a good idea – lots of duplicate places, which makes tagging new photos a nightmare. Basically iPhoto isn't designed to allow you to do anything more than rough geotagging manually. However, tagging in an external application works great. Still not sure why searching for the same place on Google maps – and selecting the same result each time – gave me so many identical, duplicate places imported into iPhoto. As Tariq said, there are lots of entries in Google – annoying – although that wasn't my problem here. All the dupes are gone now, thanks to nbidgood pointing out my stupidity.
Now I've got properly tagged photos, but it kind of sucks that nearby photos show up on every pin. I can live with that, I guess. Another problem is that iPhoto seems a bit dumb about UK addresses; Google knows the the Crewe & Harpur pub is at "Woodshop Ln, Swarkestone, Derby, Derbyshire, DE73 7JA", but iPhoto then changes that as I watch to "Crewe and Harpur Arms, United Kingdom". None of the hierarchy in between is present, which means anywhere not in a major city in the UK is just listed under "Other". Not ideal. Anyone know if there's a way to manually enter places with a proper hierarchy?
THX1227 said 9:51AM on 3-30-2009
They seemed to have fixed the Flickr upload as well -- I ran two batches of photos and it placed them on Flickr sequentially both times.
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antiorario said 10:03AM on 3-30-2009
I was trying exactly the same thing. So far, so good. (Happier now.)
nbidgood said 9:56AM on 3-30-2009
using Address Book contacts with Faces is a great addition. Of course, I had already added names to Faces for most people in my iPhoto Library before the update. The best way I found to realign these names with their Address Book entries was to selected a unassigned picture of someone, and assign their Address Book entry (rather than their existing Faces entry). Then, from the Faces browser, drag the old entry in the the one that came from Address Book. This will get their full name and email associated with all the previously tagged photos.
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DrWho said 3:36PM on 3-30-2009
Even easier way, just go to Faces and click on any name and you can type in the new name jus as you do when assigning a name to a photo in the first place.
Karsten said 9:57AM on 3-30-2009
iPhoto may support address book in one way, but the other way is still not supported. If I want to assign a photo to an address book contact, why can't i browse the iphoto library by faces yet? That problem actually isn't limited to the address book, but it extents to any application where you have the open-file-dialog.
lets hope this is added soon :-)
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Jesse David Hollington said 12:33PM on 3-30-2009
I suspect that would be more of an OS-level issue... Although there's an iLife Media Browser component, this only affects apps that are designed to browse for media (like dragging photos into iWeb, for instance).
Support inside an app like Address Book would likely require an update to that app itself, which is bundled with Mac OS X. Perhaps we'll see this in the OS X 10.5.7 update or in Snow Leopard.