iPhoto

Day & Evening With Different Parents

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Last night we got a call from MC’s parents asking if we were free for lunch today. They were visiting two of MC’s nephews and on the way back wanted to see us and check out the finished babies room. We had no plans so we looked forward to the visit.

They arrived around 11 and got to see all the work we have done on the apt. We then showed them the finished Wedding Album and then we walked to a greek place on Austin St for brunch. We had a good meal and then we all came back to the apt and went over the wedding photos in more details so we could put together an album for them.

In the evening my parents came over to drop off an air mattress we need for when guests visit. The one we have wasn’t so great. After that they took us out for dinner at a pizza place they like. After dinner we went to Italian ices and then headed back to our apartment. Since we worked on the photo album for my parents we realized we could add more photos to the album than we originally anticipated. we went through the list of photos again and had them add other shots they really wanted.

To show both sets of parents the photos, I used my MacBook air to send my screen to my Apple TV so they were able to sit on the couch and watch the photo stream while I made edits at their request. It was pretty cool. I just had iPhoto in full-screen mode and it was pretty seamless.

MC and I will work on the layout for both albums for our parents in the next week or so.

iLife 2009

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I have been using iPhoto as my photo editing and archiving software of choice for several years now, and although it isn’t perfect it is the best that I have found. Earlier this week I got iLife 09 specifically for iPhoto 09. The two main features that got my curiosity peaked is the faces and GPS features. With my iPhone I am capturing the GPS coordinates of all my camera photos so the GPS feature in iPhoto seems cool. I am still a bit gun shy to post GPS coordinates on all my photos to Flickr, but for me to have them and publish to my friends is cool.

The really interesting feature in iPhoto 09 is Faces. That is what is hopefully worth the cost of the software. I have been tagging and labeling my entire photo album for a while. It is always a work in progress. With the Faces function I can label all my photos in one shot. As I write this post I am letting iPhoto scan my library to look for faces. Hopefully it will be easy to label after that.

The one downside I have with iPhoto is that all the photo detail (EXIF) data is not stored in the photo. That means if I export a photo it won’t have any tagged details that I put in iPhoto. Since I am a fan of data portability I don’t like that. Since I have started using iPhoto I keep a copy of all photos I put into iPhoto in a separate folder in case I have problems with my iPhoto files. I am glad I did this since I already have damaged my iPhone DB once and had to restore a several months old version. Without my regular backup I would have been out of luck.

So far the new version of the app looks decent, but I am not so sure if it is worth the cost? Only time will determine that.