iLife '09 first impressions

Today I got my copy of iLife '09 from the local Mac store on the way home from work.
I was especially keen on getting my hands dirty using the new face detection and recognition feature of iPhoto 8 (='09). Secondarily I looked forward into trying the new stabilizing feature of iMovie.

After installing the bundle I booted up iPhoto. It immediately began to search for faces in my about 5000 local photos. It took about 40-45 minutes (dual cpu intel mac book pro).

Then it was my turn. I found the first photo containing faces, and labeled the first one. Then it immediately suggested a lot of other photos that might be of the same face. At first it was a bit imprecise. But after just labeling 2-4 different photos of a face, it actually got very precise! After no time (read about 20 minutes) I'd labeled about 20 faces in almost 1000 pictures. Amazing.

It happens like this: iPhoto suggest a lot of photos when you decide to confirm faces (by clicking a button). Then the suggested photos are shown, where you can either confirm or reject the faces as being of that person. It all goes pretty darn fast.

I actually believe this is the photo management application I've been looking for in years! I used to use Adobe Photo Album 2.0, then Picasa (both on PC) but when I shifted to Mac about 10 months ago I started using iPhoto. I wasn't totally amazed by it, it lacked the speed of Picasa (and Picasas way of easy sharing to picasaweb and geotagging). But now iPhoto supports it all, and more. It exports to mobileme (of course), flickr and facebook. And rocks.

When you've tagged a lot of photos for the same face, it seems to be a bit more reluctant at suggesting new untagged photos, which in my oppinion is a bit of a shame. It gets a bit too precise at this point, ignoring pictures that match the face and those just close. I'd prefer this face search algorithm to be a bit too optimistic, in contrast of being too pesimistic.

Perhaps Apple will fix this in the next fix? Well, it's not a bug at all, just a little nuisance.

Then onwards to the new features of iMovie. I just used it for 5 minutes. But in these 5 minutes I took a small video clip from a family birthday (just under 1 minutes long) which was quite jerky on the stability side. In the 5 minutes before I started writing this blog, I succeeded in applying a theme for it (nice themes they've added!). A theme is a title, transitions and an end effect. Furthermore I added stability to the clip, virtually removing all jerkiness from the clip!

The way iMovie removes jerkiness is of course by zooming in at certain points. But you have full control over the maximum allowed zooming level so you won't loose important details.

I'm impressed. iLife ´09 is a bargain!

I can't help digging deeper into the new features (including green-screen filming and composition of iMovie, learning to play my synth in GarageBand and getting all my older photos imported into iPhoto. iPhoto is definitely my primary (and only) photo management app from now on!

Go fetch.