With the new Faces functionality in iPhoto ‘09 it is easy to tag and identify “who” is in each of your photos.  With a Smart Album, it’s easy to recall photos that contain 1 or more people in them.

Once you have face tagged a portion of your photos, create a Smart Album.  In the Smart Album choose the Name field. For the condition field choose is.  You can now specify the name of a person from your Faces data.  Next, click on the Plus sign to add another line item, again choosing Name and entering the name of another person.  Make sure before you save that the Match condition is set to all.  This will make sure that this search contains both people you listed.

Here’s a sample of the smart album:

Click OK and you’ll have a smart album that will show you all the photos that contain those 2 people in them.

You can of course add more people if you wish.

TIP: A shortcut to creating the smart album is to just go to your Faces screen, select all the people you want included in the search from the cork board by CMD + clicking them, then simply drag the people to the iPhoto sidebar.  This will create the Smart Album for you.  However, by default this sets the album to the any Match, which means it will find all photos that contain any of the people.  Simply right click on the Smart Album and choose Edit, and change the any to all in the Match field.

Some people have been noting that the initial scan of their iPhoto library for faces has either failed, or has not identified any possible faces.  It seems that Apple has not given a way for users to easily rebuild the faces data.  However, if you want to force iPhoto to rescan your library to identify faces you can do the following:

DISCLAIMER:  This is only for users comfortable with navigating into their iPhoto Library.  Make sure you have a backup of your iPhoto Library before doing anything.  This is not official documentation from Apple.

This procedure will erase any Faces tagging that you have done.

1. Close iPhoto
2. Go into your iPhoto Library in the Finder by selecting iPhoto Library, right click and choose Show Package Contents
3. Delete the file face_blob.db
   
4. Delete the file face.db
5. Restart iPhoto

iPhoto should now start the initial Faces scan again, and it will rebuild anything thumbnails it may have previously created.

Here’s hoping someone finds a hidden terminal preference command to do this, or that Apple adds this ability into the UI.

Apple released iLife ‘09 this week which includes the updated iPhoto ‘09.  iPhoto has a new feature called Faces, which is a face recognition technology that identifies faces in your photos and allows you to assign a name to each face.  This allows you to sort and view photos based on a person or group of people…..very handy.

After you install iLife ‘09 and start iPhoto ‘09 for the first time, iPhoto will scan all your photos and identify what part of each photo may be a face.  This process can be lenghy, so be patient.

After poking around, here’s what I have found so far as to what iPhoto is doing.

iPhoto scans the library the first time it opens, and creates 2 faces .db files within the iPhoto Library:

face_blob.db
face.db

iPhoto creates Faces thumbnails files and places them in the iPhoto Library/Data folder along with the other thumbnails it creates.

For example, I have:

DSC_0202_face0.jpg
DSC_0202_face1.jpg
DSC_0202.jpg

So the DSC_0202.jpg is the thumbnail image that iPhoto had already created when the photo was first added, and the initial face scan added the other 2 images because it recognized 2 faces in that image.

If anyone finds out any other technical data on how faces works, please feel free to drop a comment and I’ll update the post.

Watch out Time Machine users who have upgraded to iPhoto ‘09.  Seems that if you let iPhoto manage your library (meaning you have iPhoto copy all your photos into the default ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library), after the upgrade Time Machine will backup your entire photo library again.  All of it….photos and data files.

I suspect this is due to the fact that Apple is doing special things with the iPhoto Library package.  Because you can browse your Time Machine backups from within iPhoto itself (you don’t need to browse through Finder), Apple probably wanted to get a good full backup of the entire library.

For me it was a 40GB backup that I didn’t want.  So I just went into the Time Machine interface, deleted all backups of iPhoto Libraries, and then let iPhoto backup the new upgraded library again.  This of course means that if you wanted to go back in time to say 3 months ago and get a photo you deleted, that you probably couldn’t, but I was ok with that.

If your library isn’t that large, then I wouldn’t worry about the extra space being taken up on your Time Machine drive.

Apple today announced a brand new 24″ LED Cinema Display to be used specifically with the latest Apple notebooks with Mini DisplayPorts.

Apple says the new display will be available in November for $899.

The new cinema display adds a built-in iSight video camera, Mic and Speakers.  The display also includes:

• One cable with three connectors: Mini DisplayPort, MagSafe, USB 2.0
• Three self-powered USB 2.0 ports
• Native resolution of 1920×1200
• LED backlighting

The new screen requires a new MacBook, MacBook Pro or MacBook Air with the Mini DisplayPort connector.

You can see all the new features and specs at:
http://www.apple.com/displays/

Apple slightly updated the MacBook Air today, adding the new Mini Display Port and the new Nvidia GeForce 9400M integrated graphics while increasing the hard drive sizes.

You can see all the new features and specs at:
http://www.apple.com/macbookair/

$1799 Model

• 13.3″ LED-backlit glossy display
• 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo / 6 MB L2
• 2GB 1066 MHz DDR3 Memory
• Nvidia GeForce 9400M
• 120GB SATA HD

$2499 Model

• 13.3″ LED-backlit glossy display
• 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo / 6 MB L2
• 2GB 1066 MHz DDR3 Memory
• Nvidia GeForce 9400M
• 128GB solid state drive

Today Apple announced a refresh to their MacBook Pro notebook lineup.  Similar to the MacBook announcement, Apple is choosing to keep one of the models essentially the same.

The 17″ inch MacBook Pro model will not get the new design, however it will get a larger hard drive and come standard with the high resolution display.

The new models get a new unibody aluminum design, as well as the new glass multi-touch trackpad with no physical button.

You can see all the new features and specs at:
http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/

New MacBook Pro Models

$1999 Model

• 15.4″ LED-backlit glossy display
• 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo / 3 MB L2
• 2GB 1066 MHz DDR3 Memory
• Nvidia GeForce 9400M
• Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT / 256 MB
• 250GB HD
• Slot loading SuperDrive

$2499 Model

• 15.4″ LED-backlit glossy display
• 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo / 6 MB L2
• 4GB 1066 MHz DDR3 Memory
• Nvidia GeForce 9400M
• Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT / 512 MB
• 320GB HD
• Slot loading SuperDrive

Today Apple announced a refresh to their MacBook notebook lineup.  They are keeping the low end model the same, white plastic and specs while introducing two new aluminum models.

The original white model drops from $1099 to $999, overall no changes to this model.

The MacBook now gets the same unibody Aluminum shell as the MacBook Pros have as well as the new glass multi-touch trackpad with no physical button.

One port that was removed from the MacBooks was the Firewire 400 port.

You can see all the new features and specs at:
http://www.apple.com/macbook/

New MacBook Models

$1299 Model

• 13.3″ LED-backlit glossy display
• 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo / 3 MB L2
• 2GB 1066 MHz DDR3 Memory
• Nvidia GeForce 9400M
• 160GB HD
• Slot loading SuperDrive

$1599 Model

• 13.3″ LED-backlit glossy display
• 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo / 3 MB L2
• 2GB 1066 MHz DDR3 Memory
• Nvidia GeForce 9400M
• 250GB HD
• Slot loading SuperDrive
• Backlit Keyboard

Well looks like the rumors of an Apple event on October 14th are true.  Engadget and Gizmodo have both posted that they have been notified of an invitation only event in Cupertino at Apple’s headquarters on October 14th.

If you are planning on buying a new Apple notebook, you should hold off until next week.

The Apple notebook line is long overdue for an update, not just internal updates, but also design changes.  It will be interesting to see what new designs and models will be released and at what price points.

• Will everything go aluminum?
• Will Apple have a sub $1,000 model?
• Will there be a new model in addition to the MacBook, MacBook Pros and MacBook Air?

We’ll have to wait and see.

In my previous post I mentioned how you could hold the Option key while pressing on one of those store arrow links in iTunes to stay within your local library.  I have stumbled across the following preference to switch this functionality so that you don’t have to hold the Option key.  First quit iTunes, then enter the following command in the terminal.

To reverse the way the iTunes store links work so that when you click on one you stay within your local library:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool TRUE

Now within iTunes when you click on any store arrow link you will stay within your own local library.  If you want to go out to the iTunes store you can hold Option when clicking on any of the links.

To return the store arrow links back to their original functionality, you can run the same command replacing TRUE with FALSE.