I am a long time user of Apple’s Aperture and have dabbled modestly from time to time in the iPhoto pond. Like many all over the world I bought into the iPhoto 09 hype and also fell for the clever Apple marketing scheme of putting a sufficient ’salivary gap’ between the keynote and the product release.
Well I received my long anticipated copy last night and after installing it immediately got to work putting it through it’s paces.
Referencing the Aperture library
The first thing I liked was that, by disabling the iPhoto copy-to-library functionality in the preferences and then using the Aperture media browser, I was able to import around 15,000 of my picks into the iPhoto library in short order. iPhoto references the photos in the Aperture library and only makes a copy in the iPhoto library if you do any adjustments on them. A note here is that iPhoto uses the Aperture JPG preview of the photo rather than the original which makes it blisteringly fast and is sufficient provided you have your Aperture previews set to a sufficient size; for what I would want to do with iPhoto (email, face tagging and the odd Facebook post) anything over 1000 pixels on the long edge is fine. If your Aperture previews are too small you will need to reset their size in Aperture preferences and rebuild them. I kept a healthy watch on my hard drive space during the import and was very pleased to see that iPhoto, used in this referenced way, was quite light on my precious free space.
Facial Recognition
This is the wow feature for me and the only one I hope Apple ports to Aperture pronto. Click on a couple of faces and tell iPhoto who they are and iPhoto starts showing you photos in which they appear; As you keep confirming, iPhoto keeps learning. What really impressed me was that as I was selecting progressively earlier pictures of my son it kept recognising earlier and earlier photos of him which meant I was able to tag 8 years of photos of him in relatively short order; iPhoto essentially learned ‘how’ he was getting younger back through the years.
In Aperture I would like to see this feature integrate with keywords better and leverage off all the people I’ve key-worded in my main Aperture library – used in combination with existing tags or metadata, facial recognition would be a potent feature.
Geo-tagging Location information (Places)
I was very disappointed with the geotagging option in iPhoto. I am a bit of a location nut and love embedding location data in my photos. I use a GPS logger when I am out in the field and embed the co-ordinates into my photos in a batch process on import but I still have a good few years of photos which have no location data and I was hoping this would be the answer.
Sadly it is not. The iPhoto video makes it look to easy but in my experience I found the process of clicking the photo, searching for the location, wading through all the business listings from Google, dropping the pin, naming the location and saving the data to be too much of a hassle.
I see no significant advantage over better programs such as the Aperture ‘Maperture’ plugin.
Flickr and Facebook Integration
These are in iPhoto for the consumer market. I have similar plugins in Aperture which actually do a far better job and hook me into Facebook, Flickr, iStockPhoto, Smugmug and a heap of other online systems. Apple would be really stupid to include these as a built-in option in Aperture. I believe that a baked in solution here is silly, iPhoto should have rather leveraged off the development which has been done in the Aperture plugin space to integrate with already existing 3rd party plugins.
In Summary
I like iPhoto 09 and in combination with the other iLife enhancements it is a good upgrade. The facial recognition is the only thing I’d want to see make it (in it’s current incarnation) into Aperture and only if it can leverage off all the hard work I’ve put into my tagging and metadata already. I wasn’t blown away by iPhoto 09 and it certainly (for me) didn’t live up to all the upgrade hype.
iPhoto 09 makes better use of my system resources and seems a bit snappier in some areas. Its integration with Aperture was a pleasant surprise and there are a few new adjustment tools thrown in for general photo touchups. There were a number of annoyances though – poor geotagging, the way the recommended faces move around as it prompts you for other faces which might match (which meant I was accidentally rejecting photos which weren’t under the mouse cursor a second ago) and a couple of performance slow downs due to the load iPhoto was under.
This is a good consumer level photo management upgrade to the previous version and a worthy contender to other applications like Picasa. I am endlessly amused by the number of posts I see on the web by people trying to decide between iPhoto and Aperture (or Lightroom); my advice in this regard is ‘if you are asking the difference between the two then stick with iPhoto’. New users who want an easy way to manage and share their photos – stick with iPhoto. Any serious photographer who needs the heavy lifting in the adjustment and workflow department then Aperture is your baby.
Now that I’ve played with it a bit (and because I am an Aperture user) I probably won’t use it again; other members of my family who aren’t power-users will love it because it makes general purpose photo management easy and fun. From that point of view it scores a resounding 5/5.
As a final note, contrary to the general consensus, I am pleased these new features came out in the consumer product first – that way I can feedback to Apple as to what I would like to see in their pro-level software rather than the other way around. ‘Yes’ to facial recognition and a definitive ‘NO’ to everything else.
I appreciate Stuart’s excellent review. While I don’t agree with all his conclusions, I felt like he did a great job with this piece and that’s why I asked him if we could publish it.
I am NOT a location nut – so I assume that iPhoto’s Places feature is designed for someone like me, rather than someone like Stuart who is more experienced with GEO-Tagging. I think the important news here is that it finally takes GEO-Tagging mainstream. Just as Aperture had rough spots when it first launched, new features like this often need refinement in later versions. I am just glad to see it begin with iPhoto.
Also remember that Stuart’s article is written from the perspective of an Aperture user and speaks mostly to iPhoto/Aperture integration. There are other features in iPhoto he didn’t touch on since they are not relevant to that point of view. For instance, the new slide show options are very nice, as is the ability to add animation to them with a click of a button.
Thanks for the hard work Stuart. Hopefully everyone else will chime in with their opinions too.
That said, we must keep in mind that iPhoto is not a professional application. It’s a consumer application. That means for those of us that are (or in my case, edit as if I were) professional, it is a supplemental accessory and must be treated as such.
I use iphoto for all of my P&S snapshot photos. These are family, friends, cub scout, etc photos that are important but don’t require the heavy lifting of Aperture. I have iPhoto import them as referenced files so the hard drive space is managed. The other members in my family use iPhoto. I use Aperture for my serious work.
If you’re a consumer, iPhoto is for you.
If you’re a professional, act like one and use Lightroom.
I agree with the idea from PJZ that iPhoto is for consumers. I think that REAL pros use Aperture – unless their chained to a Windows machine :)
LOL – stop typing now – I KID – I KID!
The main reason that I have iPhoto is that several of my family members use it. This makes for easy exchanges. (I haven’t yet figured out how to get my iPhoto Library connected to my External HD, which I use for LR and NX2. I can copy my Library there, but don’t know how to get imports to automatically go there rather than to my Pictures folder on my HD. I know that this is outside of the scope of this thread.)
I use iPhoto, despite everyone saying I should be using Aperture and shooting RAW. Yes, maybe it will come back and bite me, but I’m very happy with my current workflow as just someone who ‘plays’ around in photography.
That said, I have always loved iPhoto. It has a lot of management features that are very useful, and a number of basic editing features (although they don’t seem to be as powerful as proper editors, for example, no USM), but most of all I like USING iPhoto.
Everyone knows about Faces and Places in iPhoto’09, but a couple of less talked about things (probably because I’m the only crazy person to use them) are the slideshows and editing features enhancements.
The slideshows has a few new slideshow transitions that need to be seen, if only to play for a few seconds. On top of that you can export them as a movie file to sync with your iPod or iPhone.
The editing now has two added features.
The auto enhance now gives you exactly what changes are made (like black and white levels, contrast, shadow detail or whatever). Previously, when you hit this button, it did it’s magic, and you can see the rgb histogram change, but you don’t get the details of WHAT changed. This is new feature is great, because it fits into the non-destructive editing flow of iPhoto.
You can come back after making an auto enhance to make fine tune adjustments without ‘adding’ to the editing, just modifying the auto enhancements (before, making adjustments to the auto enhance would layer it on top of those edits). It means you can also come in and remove the auto enhancements made without reverting back to the whole original image. For example, in the previous version, if you made a crop and used the auto enhance, but later wanted to remove the auto enhance, your only option was to revert back entirely, and redo your crop.
The other main addition is a ‘definitions’ slider, which I’m not entirely sure what that does (well apart from improve definition :p). I’m not much of a photoshop guru, so maybe someone can enlighten me. It looks like edge contrast or something.
iPhoto appears to also make some kind of backups inside the library too. Anecdotally speaking, I think they appear when you try to rebuild the libraries. I snoop around a bit inside the iPhoto Library package, and have seen two “Before Restore” folders appear (incidentally, there’s also a metadata backup folder in here too).
Performance wise, it DOES seem a bit slower on bootup. I now have to wait several seconds while it finds itself. I’m sure this will improve with point updates. At least I hope it will. I’m also convinced that the viewing antialiasing within the window is better (like when you straighten an image it doesn’t appear as blurry as it used to when sized to fit the window), but that’s totally subjective.
Overall, I think the upgrade to iPhoto is a solid one – they have only improved or added things, and not taken out anything.
I am a very recent convert to Aperture. So recent, that the vast majority of my pictures still live in iPhoto as I’m dreading the work necessary to pull them all in to Aperture and organize them. I was excited for iPhoto 09 because I figured I could use the faces feature in iPhoto and then import those photos into my aperture library and get a jump start on my keyword project. Unfortunately, this was a colossal failure.
I’ve spent on the order of 2-3 hours “training” iPhoto on various faces. Yet still I would say it’s success rate with it’s suggestions is just north of 50%. It seems to have particular difficulty if any of your subjects are wearing glasses. Further, it very often (80% of the time or so?) fails to recognize that any face exists in a picture if the face is not perpendicular to any edge of the photo. You can add a box around the face and tag the person, but that brings me to my second complaint.
The UI around the faces feature needs some work. When looking at a batch of pictures, you click the “Names” button and enter face tagging mode. You can tab around to each recognized face. If there’s no suggestion, you can press enter to type the name. If there is a suggestion you can press enter to accept it. To reject, the quickest thing to do is to press enter to accept and then press enter again to overwrite it. You can also tab to the “Reject” button, press enter, and then type, but it’s quicker to just accept. If iPhoto detects a face where one is not present (or it’s off in the background) and you want to tell iPhoto to forget that face, there seems to be no shortcut to do this. You must drag your mouse over to the facial recognition box and click the x in the upper left corner of the box. If you want to add a facial recognition box, there is once again no keyboard shortcut. You must mouse down to the “Add” button. A giant box will be placed in the middle of the photo. You have to drag that box over the face then resize it. One of the biggest UI pains is pictures with many faces in them (group shots). It’s exceedingly difficult to get at the face you car about as the picture will be littered with people’s names that will overlap each other. Some UI tweaking is needed. Tagging thousands of photos in this manner will take quite some time if you’re trying to be thorough and it will be frustrating. When I want to add a face that iPhoto did not recognize why can’t I just option-click the center of the face and then use arrow keys (or mouse movements) to expand the box to the necessary size?
The most egregious error in my case is that iPhoto DOES NOT save the tagged name back as a keyword. If you import this photo into aperture, you will not get the names as a keyword.
With all of it’s issues and rough edges, I’m glad this feature debuted first in iPhoto. After using it for quite some time, I no longer lust after it as a feature. Here’s to hoping that apple polishes it up before we see anything like this in aperture.
Wow Derek I am not experience anything like the trouble you’re having. My face suggest rate is north of 80%. I even got it to recognize my dog! I agree the UI is rough but I don’t find it as rough as you do. As with ALL software UI is a very personal thing. Some people may love a certain way the UI works while others absolutely hate it. I think the software developers have to design for the larger majority. Time will tell whether they got it right or not based on the mass audience’s review. Hopefully, like they did with the new iMovie, if people don’t like the UI in general – then Apple will change it.
Scott:
Thank You, Thank You, Thank You!
As an Aperture user, you have answered all of my questions and you have made my day.
Now, I seem to have $79 burning a hole in my pocket. I wonder what I shall buy? Hmmm…
Levent
I am using iPhoto for all my family pictures and the really neat .Me/.Mac galleries which can be customized, reorganized, deleted and updated on the fly for clients is a dream. Now I have Aperture working after a spell with Lightroom I’m loving life. The same easy one click galleries without the iPhoto import. If you haven’t realized these galleries yet for client proofing they rock.
I wonder if iLife ’09 eats your computer up. Each new bump in software usually leaves me feeling like I need a new machine – maybe that’s the point. I don’t see a mention about the performance once on the machine RAm needed to really make it swing. It’s important to some with older machines.
Please let me correct my previous post.
Thank you Stuart for writing the review.
And thank you Scott for posting it on the twipphoto site.
Levent
What i’m finding about most of these initial reviews of iPhoto face-recognition is that all this praise is based off their experience with a small library. Try running it on a 20k+ library and you’ll start seeing a lot of issues that shouldn’t be ignored.
1) Not Accurate Enough
70-80% is impressive with 20 suggested photos but consider when you have 2000 suggestions. That’s about 150 photos you need to sift through and find are wrong. And after 3 days of the wife and I doing this then it is a tedious chore.
2) No Context Menu on Suggestions
You expect some inaccuracies between family members so sometimes a guy gets labeled as his brother. When you go through suggestions then you only get “This is Billy” or “This isn’t Billy”. How about a way to say “This isn’t Billy… It’s Jimmy”. This is almost an essential feature because many times you reject a photo but they never seem to come back as a suggestion so they’re stuck labeld as “Unknown”
3) Forced Refresh:
You know that 2hr initial face search? How about a way to do it again because on many people I’ve run out of suggested faces. But manually going through photos reveals they’re still appearing in a ton more photos.
4) S-L-O-W:
This is what’s killing me most. I have a brand new MBP w/4GB and after a few days of intense tagging the software absolutely crawls. I tried rebuilding it, worked on the wifes new Macbook and it’s just a dog. As a lightroom/picasa user i have no idea how iPhoto fans can put up with such slow software. It’s at the point of being unusable for us.
Anyway, i know it’s easy to defend the software by pointing out it’s “consumer level” and 20k photos is amateur or whatever. But this article proves that there is a lot of “pro” interest in iPhoto right now, and if this is ever going to migrate to Aperture then all of these issues need to be fixed. Or at the least, they need to be pointed out that they exist.
How to Make Smart Album for Unknown Faces:
Make a “Smart Album” with the following condition: Name – Does Not Contain – [Leave Blank]
Sorry for a second post but I wanted to make this tip for finding “Unknown Faces” in a smart album. It makes it easier to sort through all the unknowns (pending your brand new computer isn’t choking on bad code)
I mentioned a small it about performance. I have rebuilt all thumbnails and the library. I get a long lag upon first loading the software, but it runs pretty smoothly after that (with occasional lag due to internet connection). I have a MBP 2.4GHz with 4GB RAM, 256 MB video ram. I have heard, however, some people with even Mac Pros and 6GB RAM claim it to be ‘unusable’.
Derek: I see your complaints. I don’t mind it not keywording the faces, as I see it as a separate entity. I use keywords for people as well, but I see ‘Faces’ like events – kind of another way to search through a large library of photos. I knew it was never going to be perfect, and I just use it as a ‘work in progress’. If I see some tagged faces, I will name them, but I won’t get hung up about it being the end all feature to find EVERY single photo with a particular face.
For the record, my accuracy is over 90%. Maybe higher. But I guess it helps that I have hundreds of faces. It obviously works better with some people over others. It didn’t find someone with sunglasses on, but after tagging a few of those, it started finding them too.
I think it would be very interesting to see how it works underneath. Does it keep multiple records per tag? Or does it average ALL the data? There’s obviously some algorithms working such as not tagging the same name again in a photo (I have an image I made for passports and have multiple copies of the same face, but it just tags one).
I think the feature is still in its infancy, and hopefully it will see some updates, but I am still loving the novelty of it.
Cheers Scott, happy to be able to contribute. It will be interesting to see what Apple has in store for their next version of Aperture and which of the new iPhoto goodies make it.
I don’t know if you’re making this connection that you must have Aperture to handle RAW, but iPhoto can handle RAW photos just fine, and Aperture can handle JPG well too. It’s just that the iPhoto library grows very rapidly for every change that you make, JPG or RAW, whereas changes and different versions only take a tiny sliver of file space in Aperture, and presumably Lightroom too.
1) I have over 20,000 photos, and my accuracy is pretty high (90-95%). I’ve only tested it with a few people, though. When I talk about accuracy, I mean correct hits vs. incorrect, not whether it finds a face or not. It DOES differ from certain face types/people. Finds my brother and girlfriend easily, my sister not so much.
2) This is a good idea
3) This could be built into the ‘secret’ iPhoto menu. Another good idea. Although, I dread to think about going through my 4-5 hour search. But given that, if you refreshed your search (which basically just goes through and identifies a face – not necessarily tagging it), wouldn’t it just find the same faces again, with no new results? I think you mean refresh the tagging?
4) I have a MBP 2.4Ghz 4GB. Mine is as fast as ever, but with a short period of beachballing after first loading, which I think is related to network (if I turn airport off, I don’t get it).
Any ideas when we might expect Aperture 3.0?
Upgraded mainly because of faces. I could echo some of the posts on accuracy errors, but then I had a look at where it was having trouble. Some of the faces are very small so there are resolution issues. It doesn’t like hats or glasses, then these are not a face, but it is learning. Again resolution has come into the issue here. Where the person is looking is another area, straight on shot helps. Doesn’t always find my dog or cat. Well it is a people looking feature can’t complain. It did find the dog once correctly but then he was wear a shirt.
My opinion! I think it works very well. The recognition issues are because it can only do so much with what it is given. Boy I think it is doing pretty well when you look at the price.
I like it and it will only get better. Give it a chance this is a first go in a consumer product.
The places feature is another issue. Well not really I don’t have GPS embedded and I live in Australia. Searching for locations is a bit hit and miss here, but then even our official maps used by emergency services are almost next to useless. The best maps we have are Google. GPS embedded would be great and then places will be fantastic.
Go Apple iPhoto ’09 is great.