I bought Apple’s new iLife software package on Tuesday from the Apple Store in Belfast (they seemed to have plenty in stock as well) and spent the night playing with the new iPhoto. iPhoto and iDVD are the only parts of iLife I use (I use Final Cut Express for video editing, and don’t use Garage Band at all), and iDVD hasn’t been updated for this release of iLife, but I think the iPhoto update is worth the £70 or so alone.

This is a long post, so click on for my thoughts….

There are two new features in iPhoto that are brilliant. The first is facial recognition. When you start up the new iPhoto, the software scans all the photos in your library, trying to find faces. After that, it’s a case of going into one of your photos, and putting a name against a face. Do that a couple of times, and iPhoto will start to suggest photos which have that person in them.

I haven’t played around with it fully, but named a lot of people, and it seemed to do a pretty good job of recognising them. Although it did mistake me for my Dad a couple of times  

I used to hate putting new photos into iPhoto, and then having to tag them with name tags for people in the photo, and then tag them again when uploading them to Facebook. Hopefully though, this will be a thing of the past – iPhoto ‘09 includes a Facebook plug-in. So from now on the process for tagging etc. in iPhoto and Facebook should be pretty seamless:

• put photos into iPhoto
• check facial recognition in iPhoto, correct any errors
• ensure that in the Faces pane of iPhoto I’ve entered in people’s full names and e-mail addresses (in the pane that appears when you click on i on a person’s face)
• go back and select the photos I want to upload
• upload to Facebook by clicking on the Facebook icon

Hopefully then, tagging with names will be a thing of the past. If it works photos will be automatically tagged with people’s Facebook names, and uploaded seamlessly. 

Going through and correcting facial recognition errors seems to be pretty quick – you can use TAB to flick between faces in a photo, and Enter to enter the person’s name. I haven’t worked out what is the best way to go in and confirm matches though.

There’s also a Places feature in iPhoto ‘09 which allows you to tag where pictures were taken or have iPhoto access GPS data on your photos if your camera supports that (and not many seem to at the moment). My iPhone tags photos using its in-built GPS, so when I clicked on the Maps pane in iPhoto I could see where all my iPhone photos had been taken. It was pretty fun, and I’ll probably try to map most photos I take now.

Roll in some neat new slideshow templates, and enhanced editing (such as being able to improve saturation without affecting skin tone) and iPhoto ‘09 seems to be worth the money, even if you won’t be using that many other parts of iLife. For advanced editing (yet not too advanced), Photoshop Elements is probably still a good buy, but for organisation of the average person’s photo library, iPhoto seems hard to beat – with it’s options to sort and sift by event, people or places.

Amazon.co.uk at the time of writing has iLife for a slight discount, at £63.24 for the single edition or there’s the five user family pack for the non-discounted price of £85.00.

An old abandoned hotel in Corpus Christi

If you’re like me, you’ll use an image editing application quite a lot – from removing red-eye from party photographs to cropping an image, rotating it or putting a border on it for your blog and so on.

It’s sometimes frustrating though, say if you’re at work and need to alter an image quickly or away from home without a laptop or your own computer. No more! Although there are other online imaging editors out there, Photoshop Express which launched last week seems to do a pretty good job, and has a thorough (though basic) feature set. It also looks pretty good.

It’s meant to be currently available in the US only though I had no problems setting up an account. You get 2GB storage free for your images as well.

You can check out the full set of photos here – they’re great. Thanks Ellen Jo for letting me use the photo!

Via Flickr Blog.

Check this out! It’s called The Flip, and it’s a neat little video camera. I have to admit, I bought one. It comes in two versions, storing either 30 minutes or 60 minutes of video on its internal flash memory. The one I bought (60 minutes) is $149.99. The 30 minute version is $119.99.

Now while its quality might not win any awards, it isn’t bad either. It’s perfect for You Tube or any video on the net, you can hook it up to your TV as well, and the video is suprisingly watchable. The sound is ok too.

The great thing about this as a video camera is that it’s incredibly portable, and there are no cables. The USB connector for your PC or Mac just flips out of the side. And all the software you need to do rough edits or take still grabs is actually on the camera – just connect it to your computer, and you can install the software straight from the camera, meaning that you can take it anywhere, and edit anywhere too.

I’m still putting it through its paces, and have had some problems editing footage in Final Cut Express, but hopefully I’ll get those ironed out. While it’s certainly no match for the Sony Z1 we use at work, at roughly £75 compared to £1,899 for the Z1, it’s not that bad a deal!

My favourite Photo sharing everything site, Flickr, has announced 24 hours of Flickr.

Basically, they’re asking everyone to join the relevant group and upload their best photo taken on that day (geo-tagged of course) and they will be considered for publication in a book. That may be the main incentive for taking part for some, but by participating, you’ll also be helping to create an amazing record of the world on that day.

Sounds like the ideal reason to go out and about with my new camera come the 5th of May!

Well I finally got my hands on my new camera this week! It’s a digital SLR – a Nikon D40 to be precise, and I really like it for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, it’s smaller than a normal DSLR, and it’s very light as well, which means it’s pretty practical to carry around with me. Secondly, the screen on the back is enormous. Thirdly it takes photographs which are much more vivid than a normal compact digital camera. So I’m looking forward to getting out and about and taking some proper photographs with it. There is a new Nikon 40x coming out which has 10 megapixels instead of 6, but that doesn’t really make that much of a difference to me.

I used to know a bit about photography, but I’ve kind of forgotten it all, so I’ve got a new book which is meant to be pretty good according to Amazon reviews, and I’ll be working my way through that soon.

Photo: © David Martin flickr.com/photos/avidday

Scotland! I love it, but I guess that’s because I’m from there. Anyway, later this year, I’ll get to visit a part of Scotland I’ve never been to before – the Western Isles – when I head off to Islay, pictured above.

My mate Nick’s soon-to-be-wife is from there, and we’re heading there in July for his stag weekend. I’m really looking forward to it – apparently the village disco is something to behold – with bottles of vodka and polystyrene cups left on the bar so you can help yourself (I’m sure that’s not true, but I’ll be able to report on it when I go!). It’ll be really nice to visit somewhere completely different and remote.

I’m also hoping to get some great photos with the new camera I’m going to buy this month!

Flickr, the online photo sharing site, which I really love, announced recently that they are soon to start requiring old school users (i.e. people that have used Flickr for a while, like myself) to use a Yahoo! ID to log in. There’s been a whole hoo-haa about it that has been picked up by the news, and the discussion forum page concerning the news, over at Flickr itself currently has 2,192 comments on it (mostly negative).

I’m a big fan of Flickr (although some people swear by Zooomr) and I know it doesn’t sound like a massive deal, but I don’t really like it. Not because I think Yahoo are going to start some massive spying big brother type thing like some of the commenters on the page seem to think. It’s just that Flickr to me seems small (even though it’s anything but) and friendly – a real community. Yahoo! on the other hand is like some big massive corporation. And getting a Yahoo! ID that bears any resemblance to my name is unlikely seeing as so many people have one.

So it sucks a bit. But I don’t think they’ll change their minds.

Photojojo (which is a great site / newsletter btw) has a great tip today on how to make a tealight candle holder into a photo stand – cheap and stylish!

The tip comes via a Swiss company, Atelier, which has turned a whole load of household objects into other useful objects (some just silly, but some others inspired!) which you can see here.

Via photojojo.