Thoughts on iPhoto '09

I enjoy all things Mac, and am somewhat of a geek when it comes to Apple. Recently Apple announced iLife '09 - which is their suite of photo, music, movie and web tools. I'm playing with iPhoto '09 this afternoon - and it's just a little creepy...

iPhoto has some new face recognition powers that (with a little coaching) can start recognizing faces as you import them. My library took all night to set up (347 minutes) - with 20,000 photos it requires some processing on the ol' Macbook. 

Now that it has processed the photos, you go through and label a couple of photos and then iPhoto will suggest faces for you that match the one you selected. 

I was fascinated to see that my sister and my wife were often confused! Yikes. Some faces were easily recognizable (my friend Mark Kulakoff with his beard for example). My brothers and I were confused at times, and then there was a similarity between Joel Strong, Matt Martin, and my brother Doug.

Some people have similar poses from photo to photo - others (like Erin and I) are very different and unique in photos which makes it hard to match.

It suddenly opens up questions about how I make friends, the power of family resemblances, symmetry, poses, and how a unique face (or hair style) can be more memorable. 

With this new version of iPhoto, you can also label the global location, and add keywords. Along with the date stamp, faces, and events, I can see in 20 years down the road - someone could login to my facebook account or my iPhoto library and with two clicks complete a very accurate life journey of where I've traveled, who've I've met, what I listened to, and (if you really want to take it far) could piece together purchases with a debit card... and wow - you could get an incredible picture of a person's life with this info. Not that I'm into conspiracies or anything - but power corrupts, and things fall apart. 

Now I'll naively go back to labeling my photos.