You may not have noticed but Apple have just announced a new version of their photo organising / editing software, Aperture. You might not use but this is important, I’ll tell you why.
Apple is a market savvy company. Just look at the iPod, those cool MacBook laptops, all that brilliant placement in trendy films and TV shows; Apple knows technology and what people want. So when their flagship product includes a raft of new features it’s worth taking a closer look. Two areas are, in my opinion, are really interesting for you and me, “ordinary” photo collectors and photographers.
Like me you’ve got photos (digital) that you’ve taken recently, another batch that you took using film or slides that you’ve had digitised. Then there might be some family photos you’ve inherited, plus all those you’ve been sent by family members - 1,000 - 2,000?
What’s on them? Yes, loads of landscapes but mainly people - faces. That means that the main questions you ask are who? and where? To help you answer these questions Aperture now offers two features, facial recognition and geo-tagging.
Facial recognition is simple in concept but difficult to implement. The ideal is that you take one image and add the name of the person in the photo. Apple’s software then scans through your image library and identifies all other photos of that person either alone or in a group. Think how long it would take you to do that by hand. Work your way through your key family members and in a couple of hours all your portraits are “tagged”. That means you can quickly identify all the photos in your collection of the people who are nearest and dearest.
Geo-tagging means you can drop your images onto a map and Aperture makes a note of where that photo was taken. Again, a quick and effective way of adding vital data.
Put the two features together and you can brilliantly answer all those who and where questions.
Just now Apple are ahead of the wave when it comes to feature rich photographic applications, but expect it to appear in more products in the coming months.
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