eNews March 14, 2009 Meeting

Members helped each other to solve problems., an introduction to iPhoto ’09, and using iPhoto as a database.

Solving Problems

Midge Lubot was unable to download email from her main account on Gmail. Her other two Gmail accounts were downloading OK. Stephen Farber found that an “enable Pop downloads” was not checked. They then discovered that Midge had emails from 2006 that were all now downloading. She spent much of the meeting deleting hundreds of emails.

Mary Killian wanted to know how to turn a document into PDF format and attach it to an email in Gmail. I suggested that she use File > Print, then select PDF > Save as PDF. Midge suggested that she save it to the desktop, then open a message in Gmail and then select the command to save it as an attachment. In mail this is File > Attach File.

Free Quick Tips from Appl

We showed two one minute Apple quick tips from the Apple Genius Bar. You can subscribe to these video podcasts.

Open iTunes and connect to the iTunes store. Enter “Quick” in the iTunes Store search field. Key Return to see a drop down window containing “Apple Quick Tips.” Click on Apple Quick Tips. Click “Subscribe” to receive these tips in your iTunes Podcasts window ready for you to download along with future ones as they are produced.

If you want to see some examples before you subscribe, just click on the cover icon and explore.

I think you will enjoy them.

iPhoto ‘09

Next I tried to give the demonstration of iPhoto ’09 that I had requested from Apple. Unfortunately i had made some mistakes in setting and resetting the demonstration files. I still have an empty folder in the trash that I cannot get rid of with the name of an account that I had created and deleted.

So, expecting problems with the demo, I decided to start by showing the video in the welcome screen that greats you when you first open iPhoto ’09. You can see a similar video at

http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/guided-tour/

Here are some of the amazing new features in iPhoto ’09.

Faces

iPhoto uses face recognition to locate faces in the Events photographs. You click name in the toolbar, type the name, and press return to identify the face. Then iPhoto looks for faces that it thinks might be the same. You click once to confirm the name, or twice if the name is not correct. That way you can quickly identify faces in your photos. Click Done to save the changes.

iPhoto organizes photos by the faces that are in them, so you can easily find all the pictures containing a particular friend or relative.

Places

In addition to organizing your photos by Events and Faces, iPhoto ’09 organizes them using Places.

If your camera has GPS, the location will automatically be attached to your pictures when they are entered into iPhoto. You can key in the location for other pictures or indicate its location by adding a pin to a map.

Places has both a Map view and a Column view.

There are four columns in column view. If you have pictures taken in Times Square, they could be in found in locations within four columns such as United States, New York State, New York City, and Times Square.

In Map view you could see a pin for that location on the world map in, and zoom in on that area until you identified it as in Times Square.

It is a Google map, or like one, so you can see a map view and a satellite view.

Enhanced Editing

iPhoto ’09 has new enhanced editing tools.

One click enhance analyzes the picture and then adjusts contrast, exposure, or whatever it calculates will improve the image. Hold down the shift key to see the original image and then choose whichever version you like best.

Since it has face identification, it is not surprising that iPhoto ’09 has one click Auto Red-Eye correction.

It has Smart Saturation with which you can use a slider tool to increase the saturation of the picture as much as you want to without changing the skin color of people in the picture.

Use the retouch brush to remove a skin blemish near a lip, and the brush knows to stop where it reaches the edge of the lip.

And there is a shadows tool that you can use to put more light in the shadows.

Sharing Your Photos

Click on an icon to send your photo to Facebook or Flickr, or to MobileMe if you have a MobileMe account.

To make a slideshow, select any group of photos in Faces, Places, or Events. Then click the Slideshow button. Once you have created a slideshow you can change the theme and/or choose music to go with it.

You can add travel maps to illustrate your vacation trip, draw your route and use pins and labels to show where you stopped.

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Tips From Stephen Farber

Hartley, Thanks for the intro to iPhoto 09. It has motivated me to look beyond the bells and whistles to see if it's a better "data base" for images.

One new feature is to easily switch between multiple libraries (in addition to multiple users). {Don't know if this would work with the packaged "Demo" program?}  See Tips below:

http://macosxtips.co.uk/index_files/category-iphoto.html

Other "Newness" that was forgotten in my scatterbrained multitasking:

Safari 4 beta -- much faster and agile browsing even with our slow satellite connection. New features -- yes;  but overall a nicer handling vehicle.

Adobe Reader v9 up to v9.1 ; important because this is an Adobe security update. (the Reader plugin allows you to view .pdfs directly in your browser)

Thanks Stephen.

I had been wondering for some time it there was not a way to use iPhoto to get more use out of my images. Stephen’s email triggered the thought of a possibility. I think I will still do my editing in Photoshop in Camera RAW because that has saved images for me. I will save those images on an external hard drive. I have been saving them at 3000 x 2250 pixels because I do not need 12M except when cropping them.. I will create smaller 2M versions of the images to move into iPhoto on my computer to see if having them easily available by event, person, and location will increase my use of the image