I am a long time user of Apples 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 its 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 Ive 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 Id want to see make it (in its current incarnation) into Aperture and only if it can leverage off all the hard work Ive 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 Ive 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.
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)
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
Any ideas when we might expect Aperture 3.0?
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… Read more »
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 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… Read more »
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.
If you’re a consumer, iPhoto is for you.
If you’re a professional, act like one and use Lightroom.
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 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… Read more »
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!
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.
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »