Recent Photos
Apple has just released iPhoto 9.1.5 and has continued its trend towards dull grey icons, which I really don’t like. So I’ve bundled up the coloured icons from 9.1.4 and simple instructions for their installation. Someday I might automate the installation, but for now it’s just a manual copy (and authenticate).
Update 2012-01-22: I’ve tested this in iPhoto 9.2.1 and it seems to be working fine.
Anyone who would be interested has probably already heard about the Places feature of iPhoto ’09. Using
embedded Google Maps. Once you’ve done that you can browse photos by location and make some very nifty photo albums with maps. There’s more to it than that but I’d be about the millionth person to review the new features of iPhoto ’09 if I did so, so I won’t. Instead I’m going to tell you about a feature that is missing, but one that Apple have clearly been playing with.
My Geotagger program has been out for a few years now and people have been happily (and least I think so) geotagging their photos. If this is done before importing them to iPhoto everything is fine, but doing it once they are already in iPhoto’s database means that iPhoto doesn’t know about the change and consequentially won’t draw these photos on the nice new maps Apple have added. So to find a solution for this I’ve been digging around in iPhoto’s database file. It’s a simple SQLite database but I haven’t fully solved it that part of the equation yet.
The interesting thing I found, and the reason I’m telling you about this before I have finished an update to Geotagger, is that in the database I found two unused tables. For those of you that don’t know about database and tables pretend I said I just found two very interesting lists. The tables are called SqGpsTracks and GpsTracksEventsJoin. What this tells me is that Apple were working on the ability to link a GPS track with an iPhoto event for people that may have a GPS Datalogger and a camera as separate devices. iPhoto would then be able to match up the time a photo was taken with the GPS log and work out where the photo was taken. This process is pretty well documented already and I’ve been doing it for ages using Jeffrey Early’s excellent GPSPhotoLinker. It could also mean the display of routes on the embedded maps, but that can’t be proven at this stage.
Though I welcome this feature for the masses I have never fully trusted iPhoto to do any editing of my pictures. I”m quite happy doing all the editing and geotagging before hand and just using iPhoto to store and display pictures, but for those that want an integrated solution this would definitely be a step forward.
UPDATE: Others have been discovering similar things, Adam looked in the nib files and found more proof that Apple is working on interpolation.