iPhoto and Boy Scouting

I don't know about you, but I take plenty of pictures when I am on an outing with the Boy Scouts. It was not too bad when I used a 35mm camera. If I filled one roll of 24 pictures on an outing I considered that a lot of pictures. Now that I have a digital camera I have been know to take a LOT more pictures per outing. Hundreds more. The boys dread seeing me coming with the camera these days. Yet, they always enjoy seeing the pictures.

I use an Apple Mac Pro computer at home so I use iPhoto to store, label, and sort my digital photographs. And there is a lot to sort. I have nearly 9000 photos of Scout and events. That does not include any family photographs. I will usually label the photos right away by event and date to make them a bit easier to find, but it can still take awhile to find that one picture I may be looking for to use in a project.

This week Apple came out with their new version of the iPhoto software. It has a couple of features that I am looking forward to using. The first is called Faces. It is a program that will recognize the faces of people in the photos. After applying names to those faces the program will label other pictures in which it finds that person and create an album for that person's pictures. This feature could come in quite handy for preparing that Eagle court of honor presentation, or a family birthday or anniversary show.

The second new feature is called Locations. If you have a camera with a built in GPS feature (like some cel phones) information about the location of the place the photo was taken could be embedded in the photograph. The new Locations feature will group photographs taken at locations. Want to find all your pictures taken at Many Point Scout Camp or Philmont, just ask iPhoto to find them. I do not see myself using this feature as much as Faces, but it could come in handy.

I hope these new features work as well as Apple says they will. This could save me a lot of time when working on future projects. After all, it can be quite challenging finding that perfect picture when you have hundreds or thousands of pictures to scan through. My program arrived this week and I am looking forward to playing with it this weekend.