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Corralling Your iPhoto Library

Scott Rose — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:37:18 -0600

Call me anal, but I like things to be in folders of my choosing, so I can find them later without going through my iPhoto library. Importing photos to iPhoto creates a new folder. I’ve figured out how to give that new folder (film roll) a name of my choosing. Sometimes I’d really like to add photos directly to (or import directly to) an existing iPhoto folder (film roll). Is there a way to do this?

Sort of, but first we need to clear up some semantic issues. You don’t say which version of iPhoto you’re using, but starting in iPhoto ’08, new photos are imported into dated Events, based on when they were taken. We think these Events are probably what you’re referring to as folders or film rolls.

iPhoto ’08 and ’09 automatically split your photos into Events when you import new photos, but you can control this autosplit somewhat in iPhoto > Preferences > Events. If you want to see all of your photos without them being split into Events, just click Photos in the iPhoto sidebar, under Library.

Merging two Events into one gives you more control over organizing your photos.

After iPhoto imports new photos into automatic Events, you can redirect them into already-existing Events. Click Events in the iPhoto sidebar if you’re not already in Events view, then click the new Event that iPhoto just created to select it. Now find the old Event you want to combine the new photos with, and select that one too by Command-clicking it. Now just click the Merge button in the toolbar at the bottom of the window to combine those two Events into one. You might have to rename the new Event; click its name to do so. For example, we take a lot of iPhone screenshots, as you can imagine, so our iPhoto libraries have lots of Events that are just a few screenshots, rather than a party, trip, or real-life occasion. So every month we combine all those screenshot-only Events into one, and call it, for example, “August 2009 iPhone screens.”

If you double-click an Event to view its photos and notice some that shouldn’t be there, just select them all and click the Split button to split those photos out into a new Event.

And, of course, iPhoto still supports Albums if you’d rather organize your photos that way. Just select any group of photos, click the Plus sign button at the bottom-left of the window, and use the pop-up dialog to create a new Album. Later you can drag in new photos, change their order, and even delete photos from the Album without deleting them from your whole iPhoto library. You can also put a single photo in as many Albums as you like, even though each photo can only be part of one Event.

Kill the iPhoto Auto-Launch?

Scott Rose — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:31:41 -0500

Every time I plug my iPhone into my Mac to synchronize or recharge the battery, iPhoto launches. How do I stop this from happening?

Whenever you shoot photos or videos on your iPhone, your new media shows up in the Camera Roll album of your iPhone’s Photos app. And once there’s media sitting in that Camera Roll, your Mac will think that you’ve connected a digital camera whenever you plug in your iPhone to sync with iTunes.

Since iPhoto, by default, automatically launches whenever you connect a digital camera, iPhoto will open up in anticipation that you’re going to import the photos from your digital camera (that is, your iPhone). You can turn off this behavior by going into iPhoto’s preferences, clicking on the General tab, and then choosing No Application in the dropdown labeled Connecting Camera Opens. But in the future, whenever you connect any digital camera (including your iPhone) to your Mac, you will have to manually launch iPhoto if you want to import photos.

As long as you keep your iPhone Camera Roll album empty, iPhoto won't launch when you connect your iPhone to your Mac.

A better solution might be to use iPhoto’s auto-launching behavior as a reminder to import the photos into your iPhoto library. Then, after the import is complete, tell iPhoto to delete the photos from your camera. This will remove all the photos and movies from your iPhone’s Camera Roll, thus preventing iPhoto from automatically launching again unless you have new media that needs to be imported.

If you still want to keep a copy of those photos on your iPhone, simply place them into an album in iPhoto, and then tell iTunes to synchronize that album with your iPhone.

iPhoto 8.1 Hits The Streets, Adds New Templates, Larger Hardcover Book

Cory Bohon — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:06:50 -0500

Apple didn't release a tablet Mac today, but they did give us an extra-large version of the iPhoto books that we've come to love. With the iPhoto 8.1 update, you now have access to three new book themes (Tropical, Asian, and Old World), new holiday themed greeting cards, and a new 10" x 13" extra-large iPhoto book.

The new large book can be had for $49.99 and features a satin-finished dust jacket with a glossy cardboard sleeve that it ships in. You can get the new update and all the features by opening up Software Update (Apple menu > Software Update) or by downloading the installer package from Apple's Support Downloads website.

Connected Flow FlickrExport 3 for iPhoto

Ray Aguilera — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:16:00 -0500

FlickrExport adds ninja-level precision to your Flickr uploads, from within iPhoto.

Photography nuts love photo-sharing site Flickr.com. And for years, third parties have provided iPhoto plug-ins that let you export your images directly to your Flickr account. For ease-of-use, these plug-ins beat standalone apps--and Flickr’s Web-based uploader--for getting images from your Mac into your photo stream. And since most photo geeks frequent Flickr anyway, it’s always made the most sense to us to be able to post your stuff there from within iPhoto itself. In iPhoto ’09, Apple introduced support for uploading to Flickr. But in our tests, the power and flexibility of Connected Flow’s FlickrExport makes Apple’s efforts look like amateur hour.

iPhoto’s native support for Flickr is the essence of Apple simplicity. Select some images, and choose Share > Flickr. The first time you do this, iPhoto will prompt you for your Flickr log-in info, and iPhoto will ask you to set a privacy level for the uploads as well as relative sizes. Nice, but this doesn’t give you much control--even for Flickr newbies. FlickrExport, by comparison, offers tons of options for customizing and controlling your Flickr uploads.

FlickrExport installs as a plug-in, and in our tests, worked more reliably than iPhoto’s Flickr support. FlickrExport adds a Flickr tab to iPhoto’s Export pane (File > Export). From there, you can edit Titles, Descriptions, Tags, and Privacy settings for your photos--as a group, as well as individually. FlickrExport also allows you to add photos directly to Flickr group photo pools and add to your own existing photosets or create a new photoset as you upload images. And for users with free accounts, a handy status gauge shows how much of your upload quota has been used for the month. If space gets tight, FlickrExport can automatically resize your images to conserve bandwidth. Users of previous versions of FlickrExport will be interested in new features, including presets for uploads to Flickr groups and the ability to incorporate location data into your photos manually or via GPS track logs, perfect for documenting your travels visually.

We were able to easily import large and small groups of images to our Flickr account, and in all cases Tags, Titles, and other metadata were correctly applied, even when we supplied a complicated mishmash of data to certain images and not to others. Our exports were reasonably quick, and we didn’t notice FlickrExport bogging down our iMac while we zapped large groups of photos up to Flickr’s cloud. And for Aperture users, Connected Flow offers a version of FlickrExport tweaked to take advantage of Aperture’s features as well. For active participants in Flickr groups, the ability to save sets of groups within FlickrExport is a huge timesaver--although we had a few problems with presets selecting incorrect groups. And the only options for managing presets are deleting or renaming them--an editing interface to tweak presets would have been nice.

Pre-View Says "Yes" To iTunes, iPhoto

Amy Keyishian — Fri, 29 May 2009 12:21:00 -0500

The forthcoming Palm Pre smartphone is skipping a two-step so tricky, it'd defeat Steve-O on Dancing with the Stars: to position itself as a valid competitor against the monster that is iPhone, while confirming iTunes' status as the dominant music app. Isn't that like wearing your wife's ex-husband's boxers?

Maybe it's just smart business. At any rate, Paul Cousino of Palm confirmed yesterday at the All Things Digital conference that the Pre will sync with iTunes (on PC and Mac), and with iPhoto (on Macs only), though users will have the option to forego the app and simply use the Pre as a mass storage device.

John Rubenstein, Palm's CEO, also noted that his years at Apple affected the design of the Pre -- and claimed, via a video, that the Pre "eats iPhones for breakfast." We'll see who's eating whose shorts on June 6, when the Pre hits stores.

Via Electronista, Information Week

iPhoto '09

Susie Ochs — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:51:46 -0500

Twenty-two years after Madonna sang “Who’s That Girl?” iPhoto ’09 uses facial recognition to organize your photos based on who’s in them. With an Event or album selected, you click the new Name button in the toolbar to get started. iPhoto looks for faces in your photos, and you type in the name of each unknown face to “teach” the app to recognize your friends and loved (or at least photographed) ones. In our tests, it occasionally mistook part of the background for a face, and often missed faces wearing sunglasses or ski goggles. You can draw frames around faces it misses or people who are facing away from the camera, and tag them manually, however.

Your friends live on the corkboard-we got iPhoto to recognize our cats after we tagged them over and over, but so far no luck with our canine pals.

Everyone you’ve tagged appears on the corkboard when you click Faces in the sidebar--click them to see all the photos you tagged of that person, along with iPhoto’s best guesses for what other photos they appear in, then click the Confirm Name button and either confirm or reject each guess. The more you tag and confirm, the more dead-on the guesses get--no facial recognition is 100 percent accurate, except maybe the CIA’s, and they’re not sharing.

Places lets you look at a terrain map, satellite image, hybrid, or a normal list view.

The other big new feature, Places, uses the latitude and longitude data recorded by GPS-equipped cameras (including the iPhone 3G) to plot your photos on a map, so you can find images based on where they were taken. If you’re not into zooming and panning around the map to find your locations, a button in the toolbar lets you switch to List view, an iTunes-like browser where your photos are  sorted by country, state, city, and then landmark.

If your camera doesn’t geotag your photos automatically, you can add the locations yourself by clicking the little i button in a photo’s lower-left corner to flip it over (if your digicam takes SD cards, you might also consider picking up an Eye-Fi Explore card, which automatically uploads your pics wirelessly to the photo site of your choice and adds geotags to each image). As you type a location, iPhoto gives you a list of preloaded cities and points of interest, or you can add a new location (even looking them up by street address) and drop a pin to mark it. And if you want to edit the landmark for a geotagged photo--iPhoto split our pictures into “Brooklyn Bridge” and “The Brooklyn Bridge,” for example--just click the same little i and make your corrections.

Two new buttons in the iPhoto ’09 toolbar let you upload images to Facebook (with support for Faces tags) and Flickr (with support for geotagging). Unfortunately, both are steps backward from third-party plug-ins that already exist. We vastly prefer the Facebook Uploader for iPhoto (free, developers.facebook.com/iphoto), a free plug-in for iPhoto ‘06 and ’08 that still works with iPhoto ‘09. That plug-in lets you upload photos to any of your existing Facebook photo albums or create a new one, and gives you a chance to add a caption or tag your friends before uploading.

While the built-in Facebook option in iPhoto ’09 carries your Faces tags over automatically, you can’t add captions (and it doesn’t grab your descriptions), and a new Facebook album is created with the same name as the Event or iPhoto album you’re uploading from. This is because iPhoto keeps a link between the two, so if your friend tags someone in the photo on Facebook, that identity is synced back to your image in iPhoto. If you move the photo to another Facebook album, the link breaks. One way to at least keep all your iPhoto-to-Facebook images in  one Facebook album is to upload them from a “Facebook pics” album  within iPhoto, but the plug-in is way more flexible.

The built-in Flickr uploading also lacks options available in existing third-party plug-ins for previous versions of iPhoto. Again, photos are added to a new set with the same name as the Event or album you’re uploading from, and the only thing you can specify is who’s allowed to view your photos. Location data is uploaded if you check a box in iPhoto > Preferences > Web. The album is kept synced between Flickr and iPhoto, but if you want to add captions, you’ve got to do it in Flickr. The Free Flickr eXporter iPhoto Plugin (free, www .dustin.li) doesn’t support iPhoto ’09, but we got iP2F ($14.95, www.tagtraum.com) and FlickrExport (£12, connectedflow.com) both working with it even without “official” support.

Clicking the Slideshow button lets you choose from six templates (the edgy Shatter template impressed everyone at the keynote demo, and the Snapshot and Sliding Panels themes are cool too), tweak the music and settings, and easily export the finished show to iTunes, optimized for iPhone, iPod, Apple TV, your computer, or MobileMe--or just save it as a QuickTime file to your hard drive. This is a cinch and makes those “oh, let me show you some photos” moments a lot more lively.

The Adjust panel’s sliders are reordered; start from the top and work your way down.

Other improvements include the editing tools: You can adjust an image’s saturation without affecting the skin tones, and the new Definition slider adds more contrast to the midtones, which boosts detail. And the hardcover photo books (found in the Keepsakes button) now have a glossy laminated cover to show off your photos, and higher-quality binding and printing for the same price, and they’re still as easy as ever to put together.

20 Helpful iLife '09 Tips and Tricks

Roberto Baldwin — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 06:07:14 -0600

Every year Apple rolls out another version of iLife. While iPhoto and GarageBand got major updates, some apps, like iWeb and iDVD, ended up being nearly forgotten about. Still, with updates come new features to figure out and a navigation that's changed ever so slightly.

We dived right into the new suite and came up with 20 tips and tricks that we hope will help you enjoy all the features the new iLife '09 has to offer.

iPhoto

1. Add geo-tagging info to your uploaded photos - By default, iPhoto doesn't upload photos with location information to online sites. To share your location with the world, open the iPhoto preferences, choose Web and click on "include location information for published photos."

2. See only photos that haven't been imported - If you store images on your iPhone, but want them to be imported into iPhoto, you can show only the photos that need to be imported by checking the "Hide photos already imported box."

3. The more you tag, the smarter iPhoto gets - Find a group of images with a certain person. As you tag the images, iPhoto will learn their face and will eventually ask if if they are the person you're looking for. No word if iPhoto will help you find the droids you are looking for.

4. Multiple people in Faces - You can tag multiple people in a photo. Click on Faces and iPhoto will attempt to find all the faces. You can tag faces already found, then click on "add missing face" to create new face boxes. Adjust the size of the box, click done and add the name.

5. Hide photos - Got photos you want to keep, but they might be NSFW, or you have photos are just cluttering up an event. Use the Hide feature to make those photos disappear without deleting them. Select a photo you want to hide and cick on the red X Hide button. You can show all your hidden photos, select View>Hidden Photos in the menu bar.

6. Zoom in and out - Double left clicking zooms in to the map in iPhoto. Double right clicking zooms out. You can also use the slider in the lower right-hand corner.

7. Use Faces for animals - While not an official feature in iPhoto, we were able to get iPhoto to recognize the differences between two cats and train the app to recognize their faces.

8. Moving Faces on the Corkboard -Be careful when moving faces around on the Corkboard. You can accidentally drop a person onto another person. It will erase your tags you've added to that person. A quick cmd-z will reverse the problem.

9. Change a person's Faces Key Photo - Open a person's images in Faces. Right click on the image you want to be the key photo and choose "Make Key Photo" An easier method, drag your mouse over the key photo in the corkboard view and while the photos are changing, tap the space bar on the photo you would like to be the key photo, violá!

10. Empty the trash - The trash is usually filled with photos you don't want, empty it for more space. Right click and delete those lame photos.

Tips for GarageBand, iMove and iWeb are waiting for you on the next page.

GarageBand

1. Make sure your Mac can hear your Guitar -By default, GarageBand is setup for a guitar to be connected to the program. If you're taking a lesson and need to tune your acoustic guitar, click on Setup>My Input Device> and choose Internal Mic.

2. Screensaver? No problem - If you're concerned about your Screen Saver or Energy Saver preferences messing with your guitar lesson, don't be. GarageBand takes that into account and disables both when you are taking a lesson.

3. Artists got bills to pay - If you plan on purchasing GarageBand so you can be taught by Sting how to play Roxanne, be warned. Artist Lessons will set you back $4.99. It's still cheaper than having Ben Folds show up at your house with a grand piano.

4. Easier Ringtones - GarageBand has ringtone template now. To make a ringtone from an MP3, or unprotected AAC file, choose the oddly named "Example Ringtone" from the iPhone Ringtone selections in the GarageBand splash screen. Delete the jingle Apple has in the time line, click on the media browser and drag your song of choice to the timeline. Adjust the cycle region to your liking, choose Share>Send Ringtone to iTunes from the menu bar and you're ready to rock out with each incoming call.

5. Scoring notes - To write a score with real notes, instead of fumbling around with the keyboard to play virtual instrument, can be a bit confusing at first. Select a virtual instrument track, in the time line cmd-click where you would like to place your notes. Double click on the box you've created an the drawer with the Score Option should appear. Now cmd-click on the score to add notes.

6. Better search - When looking for the perfect song in your iTunes library, the Media Browser helps you narrow you choices down. By clicking on the magnifying glass in the search field you can search by, Artist, Song, Composer, and album.

iMovie

1. Image stabilization takes a long time - Stabilize all your clips when you're done with everything else. That way you can go for a walk or grab quick lunch.

2. Media in other places - Right click the in the Event Library to find videos stored on other drives, or in other parts of your Macs drive.

3. 500 miles and counting - When using the travel globes, try and make the minimum distance at least 500 miles. Anything less looks really lame.

iWeb

1. Facebook notification - Keep your friends in the loop with Facebook notifications that your site has been updated. When you publish your site for the first time after upgrading, you get the option to link your Facebook account.

iPhoto's Faces Recognizes Cats

Roberto Baldwin — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:27:16 -0600

A huge disappointment for pet owners, was word that iPhoto's newest feature, Faces, wouldn't recognize animals according to Apple employees on the show floor. We even did a few tests at Macworld Expo with images they had of the dog Luce.

Well, we are happy to say that we were able to get iPhoto to recognize Robbie's Cat, Lola.

Click to embiggen

In clear images with two cats to choose from, the feature was able to pick out the correct cat. Like adding people to faces, the key is to train the software to recognize a person, or animal in this case, by tagging a few images manually.

Click to embiggen

Once a base face is established, iPhoto begins finding the person, or animal, on its own. At that point, you just need to confirm the animals face in the Faces' "Confirm Name" menu.

Click to embiggen

Search results mirrored those of our tests with human faces, with a small percentage of images that were either, not the correct person, or in some instances, a random round object.

This is a banner day for pet owners.

Editor's Note: Don't fret dog owners, we're going to test out dog images to make sure man's best friend wasn't left out of the loop.