Extra Faces

More possible iPhoto features

Whilst we’re talking about a couple of possible iPhoto features and overhauls, how about extending Faces by making it actually a bit more useful?  Whilst it’s great being able to tag people, the only way to use this information is for uploading to Facebook or when searching.  There’s a few things that could be done to exploit this information, especially when combined with other metadata from the photographs.

For example;

• Being able to select multiple Faces in iPhoto and seeing photos that contain all of the selected people.
• A graphical view of a person’s timeline over their lives, either;
  • A graph of time (using the datestamp from the photo), or;
  • Time combined with a travel map for a certain period of time (using the Places tag)?
  • These could also be used with multiple people, for example people who commonly holiday together shown on a travel map over time.
• Being able to customise the Faces view, for example to sort by Surname, change the background etc.
• Better Address Book integration;
  • Being able to open an Address Book entry from iPhoto.
  • Setting the image in Address Book from a Faces entry.
• A graphical view of relationships between people (as can be set up in Address Book).  This is a quicker, easier version of family tree functionality in iPhoto I suggested before.

Family Photos

Getting Genealogy

I’ve been looking into my family history and have been trying to find a decent genealogy application for the Mac.  Ideally it would need to have a graphical representation of the tree and relationships between family members, support for photos, dates and locations.

That got me thinking; I already have an application that supports photos, dates, locations and people.  iPhoto.

Recently I suggested that panorama stitching support may be the next big thing to hit iPhoto, but what if Faces in iPhoto was extended to include relationships between people, and more metadata like datestamps (such as birth/death/important events, which of course could be linked to photos) and locations like photos already have.  This would make it a fairly full featured genealogy application.

It could be fairly trivial to define relationships using drag and drop, and Apple already has applications that do something similar: Quartz Composer forms connections between modules like this, as does Interface Builder in Xcode.

It may seem like a strange direction to take, but if you consider that Apple has developed iPhoto and the whole iLife package to draw consumers to the Mac, and in my experience at least, more and more people are getting interested in their genealogy.  It could also integrate with online genealogy services as it already does with FaceBook and Flickr.

Stitching iPhoto

iPanorama?

A few years ago I found myself wishing that iPhoto had facial recognition and location tagging.  They were subsequently added with Faces/Places.

Recently I have been thinking that I’d love iPhoto to have the ability to create panoramas stitched together from multiple photos.  Going on my good record of predicting features I’m hoping I get three out of three and iPhoto adds this in the next couple of years.  This could be relatively easy to do the basics at least, using an open source project like autopano-sift or something similar.  Then it would of course need the traditional Apple polishing and ease of use to make it a good iPhoto citizen.