iLife 09

I'm particular. Really particular. I don't think it goes so far as OCD, but I like things to be organized and consistent. I've spent way too much time organizing our movie library (html code from scratch), our online book library (Librarything.com), our music library, and of course our image library (Flickr). Then of course there are our book shelves which have to be organized... because Harry Potter needs his own shelf, all the leatherbounds must be lined up tallest to shortest, and it would be downright blasphemous to mix the mass-market paperbacks with the hardcovers... um, really I swear it's not OCD (but if you put Stephenie Meyer next to Isaac Asimov I just might flip).

Anyway, when we first got our Mac Mini, I played around with iLife 08 but wasn't too impressed... my own personal system worked better for me. But when iLife 09 came out about a month ago, I knew things were going to change. The main reasons we upgraded were iMovie and iPhoto.

iMovie has been great, allowing quick and easy movies... I used it to make the announcement video in the previous post. I've used many different tools to make video clips/shorts before and iMovie 09 is definitely one of the simplest while turning out great quality (though it is limited and can't match the $300+ PC software I'm used to... also the prior version, iMovie 08, was a completely different story and a complete waste of time).

Even better than iMovie, iPhoto has been my favorite part of iLife. I used it to quickly and easily make this slide show for Aeriana's cousin's birthday.


It has the Places feature which allows me to map the location of where I took photos, and then plots them for me (also searchable based on location, etc.).


Then there's the Faces feature which auto-identifies people with some pretty impressive accuracy.


Finally there is the Flickr feature, which let's iPhoto sync with our Flickr account and vice versa. And here is where my 'particularness' comes in... you see, the Flickr feature is limited to only new uploads directly from iPhoto. With thousands of images already on Flickr unable to take advantage of the new organization/tagging features, what is a nearly-OCD guy to do? Well, delete the thousands of online pictures and re-upload all 8+ gigabytes of photos, of course. And so it's been almost non-stop (Erin would probably try to make me delete that 'almost') over the past couple of weeks that I've been sorting, organizing, naming, placing, tagging, deleting, and uploading pictures.

Finally, as of tonight, I'm done. Sort of. There's still some minor updates I'll be doing, but at this point everything is synced so I can go into iPhoto whenever I get a chance, make a change, and then see that change reflected on Flickr soon after. And one of the main benefits is that from now on, adding new pictures we take will be extremely easy; I've figured out the shortcuts and tricks and will be able to manage all future albums in much less time.

To me, the 'particular' one, all this up-front work is really worth while... now with literally three clicks of the mouse I can see every single picture of Aeriana we have. Or every picture of my parents. Or my sister Dacia's family. Add a couple more clicks and I can make a slide show of pictures of Erin and Aeriana together. Hey that's not a bad idea... maybe it will soften up Erin and get me out of the dog-house for being practically non-existent while working on my latest project.


Wow, that was easy. I love iLife!


**Update**
It's Saturday morning now and Erin read the post and saw the slide show... everything backfired. I asked if I got bonus points for the slide show, she said "No, I know how easy it was." That was definitely an unintended consequence. So then I asked if the fact that our pictures were now so well organized gave me bonus points. Her response "Nope... pizza would!" Ah pregnancy cravings...

Labels: Aeriana, Brett, Erin, family, movies, music, pictures, video

posted by Brett at 9:18 PM