Macworld ’09: All About the Mac, iLife ’09, Faces and Places
by John Paczkowski
Posted on January 6, 2009 at 9:09 AM PT
An appreciative Phil Schiller welcomes the crowd and thanks everyone for showing up. He says it’s an incredibly exciting time for Apple (AAPL), and offers a quick overview of Apple’s new retail stores. “Each and every week some 3.4 million customers visit Apple Stores worldwide,” says Schiller, who notes a resurgence in interest in the Mac. Says Schiller: This year’s Macworld will be all about the Mac. I’ve got three new things to tell you about.
The first: iLife ‘09. iPhoto now offers a new feature called Faces, which categorizes photos by faces. The software uses a technology called “face detection” to ID the subjects of photos. It asks you to identify the subjects first and then scans the remainder of your photos; using face recognition, it identifies other photos in which those subjects appear.
Another new iPhoto feature: Places. It does the obvious. Using the GPS geotagging built into newer cameras and “the best cellphone in the world,” iPhoto identifies the location at which photos were taken and categorizes them accordingly. What about photos that don’t include those geotags? Manual entry solves that problem with a little help from Google Maps.
Apple has also added Facebook and Flickr support to iPhoto. Set up your accounts in iPhoto and the software will automatically send your photos to those services and allow your Facebook friends to tag them if you so choose. Beyond these features, iPhoto includes a slick new slideshow and book themes.
