From upgrades to updates

Dark, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Twigs, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Path, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Lake, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Wet, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

First we had snow, then fog, now rain. Sorry to disappoint Mark who liked my less dark photographs, but this set is dark.

Also, returning to the topic of that posting, there was a new version of iPhoto released, version 9.1, which was promised to contain stability improvements. And also version 10.6.5 of Mac OS X was released, which contained speed improvements for iPhoto. So things are getting better I guess - and perhaps the occasional freezes of iPhoto are now fixed.

Did I make a hasty investment in additional memory when upgrading from 4 GB to 6 GB? Probably not - memory is always faster than disk, and it is in any case becoming a bottleneck on the iMac, which is now 3 years 3 months old.

Also, I got in a comment by Ssp a link to a funny web site of iPhoto failing to recognize faces, or in fact recognizing faces where there are none. This was done with the iLife '09 version of iPhoto - I guess the iPhoto version number was 8.0 in these images.

By the way, the Apple naming scheme of the iLife application is strange, using both years and numbers. So, the new iPhoto I have belongs to iLife '11 and has version number 9.1.

After looking at the funny examples, it appears that the face recognition has changed somewhat between the versions 8.0 and 9.0. At least I didn't get to use the feature in this manner. In fact, I got the feeling that face recognition works now more as an assistant, not in charge. I didn't get many false positives - actually, only one; on the other hand, there are plenty of faces which the program doesn't recognize even after teaching it a lot.

So, is the feature a gimmick or not? Well, it works to some degree, so that you get at least some faces recognized, and can thus browse galleries organized by faces. On the other hand, it would take a lot of work to finish the organizing, that is, to teach the program the remaining faces. So, limited success.