My copy of iLife '09 arrived on Thursday (thanks Chris!), and since then, I've found that the new version of iPhoto has been a major time suck! After installing, iPhoto took about 90 minutes to go through all 12,655 of my photos, looking for faces. After that, I starting telling iPhoto the name of each face. And once I started, I couldn't stop! I went to bed late on Thursday partly because of iPhoto, super-late on Friday (definitely due to iPhoto), and spent a good chunk (far too long, actually) of Saturday wrapping things up. When all was said and done, I had identified 195 people in my photo library, comprising 1,437 photos total.
What's great about this, is that as I was adding face information to all of my photos, I was taking a tour through my photo library -- some of these pictures I haven't looked at in over 6 years! And of course, iPhoto was showing me all of the best ones -- those photos with people that I know.
So on the whole, I'd say that I'm pretty pleased with the new iPhoto so far. While there are some definite quirks with Apple's implementation of face detection in iPhoto, I'm definitely please to have it. And after getting all of the face information in my photos, now I can put together Mike-centric slideshows like this:
"Mike Hunter, the slideshow!" Music is "vagrant", by Philip's Head.
I could see creating some canned slide shows like this, and having them sync'd to Apple TV for when we have company over.
And now that I'm looking at my photos more, I'm more included to edit them. So far, I have tried the new automatic red-eye removal, and come away impressed. In the majority of my photos, just pushing one button found the red eyes, and terminated them.
The only bad things that I've encountered in iPhoto '09 so far are bugs -- it leaks memory like a sieve (I got one process up past 2GB of resident memory before iPhoto crashed), so I have taken to keeping Activity Monitor open, and once iPhoto grows to about 1.5GB of memory used, I kill it and start over. In addition, there are some other random bugs -- at one point, iPhoto thought that about half of my Mike photos were actually of Kristen (I guess all white people really do look alike, eh iPhoto?). While this was fixable, it was still pretty strange. My guess is that iPhoto 8.0.1 isn't far around the corner. :)
But now that I have all of the faces in my photos identified, I can't wait to see what the next version of iPhoto will bring. It would be really great if I could separate my photos into groups like friends, co-workers, family, etc. But, I don't really want to have to go and add that bit of data to each person, I'd rather have iPhoto discover it for itself. Thankfully, I have already placed all such info on the Internet -- on my Facebook. If iPhoto could read my social graph on Facebook, then it could automatically categorize my photos not just be the people that they contain, but their relation to me. And that would be really smart, and allow for even more amazing ways to view and share my photos.
So in summary, while I'm pretty happy with iPhoto '09, I can't wait for iPhoto '10. ;)
-Andy.