Photos

Microsoft's new Windows ad made its expected debut over the weekend, with a 4-year-old cutie named Kylie showing how easy it is to use Windows Live Photo Gallery to edit and share photos.

As I noted last week, Microsoft is pushing ahead with new spots in its Windows ad campaign after taking some time off following the Gates/Seinfeld and "I'm a PC" spots.

In the new spot, which debuted during the Grammy Awards Sunday (and is embedded below), Kylie shows how she uses the program to touch up her photo and then share it with … Read more

Just got an e-mail from Alexander Turcic over at MobileRead.

Turcic, based in Switzerland, writes:

I hope you are doing fine. Got some news regarding Kindle 2 price and release info, plus the first Kindle 2 pics.

Cheers, Alex

According to the post, the Kindle 2, which is expected to be announced Monday at 10 a.m. in New York, will be available on February 24 and carry a list price of $359--just like its predecessor. All in all, the device looks similar to what we saw in earlier leaked photos, but in these shots the Kindle 2 looks sleeker and decidedly more impressive. While we have no confirmation that this is the real deal, these look like marketing shots if I ever saw them.

More photos after the jump. … Read more

Play With Pictures takes one of the most essential image-editing features and expands it into an entire program. It is not a photo editor, at least not in the mold of Photoshop. Play With Pictures takes the cut-and-paste feature and simplifies the process while building out supplementary features for creating online avatars, greetings cards, and other projects that require image mash-ups.

The interface presents a reimagining of the image-editing toolset, gearing users towards projects instead of stand-alone edits. The left nav toolbar even notes the steps needed to take a user from start to finish. Tools are categorized as Start, … Read more

Play With Pictures takes one of the most essential image editing features and expands it into an entire program. It is not a photo editor, at least not in the mold of Photoshop. Play With Pictures takes the cut-and-paste feature and simplifies the process while building out supplementary features for creating online avatars, greetings cards, and other projects that require image mash-ups.

The interface presents a re-imagining of the image editing toolset, gearing users towards projects instead of stand-alone edits. The left nav toolbar even notes the steps needed to take a user from start to finish. Tools are categorized … Read more

Back in September, I mentioned a new GPS geotagging device for digital cameras with hot shoes, the Jobo PhotoGPS. Unfortunately, at launch, Jobo left Mac users out of the picture, so to speak: the included software used to match the receiver's recorded data to photos transferred to a computer was Windows only. However, arriving a little later than originally planned, there is now a Mac version of the software.

For the unfamiliar, the PhotoGPS is a small and lightweight GPS receiver that fits directly on any digital camera's hot shoe--just like a flash unit. The $175 device allows … Read more

The iPhone 3G brought changes in shape, function, features, etc., relative to original model, but, to the dismay of many cell phone, photographers, the device retains the same 2.0 megapixel camera. Apple enhanced the camera by coupling the camera to the GPS features of the iPhone 3G to enable photo geotagging, but this did little to calm the complaints about the camera's resolution, lack of flash and other features available on a few other phones. Last October, I wrote a lengthy article about the state of photography on the iPhone and, months later, I'm still amazed by … Read more

Apple updates its popular production suite, iLife, that aims to corral your video, photo, music, and Web needs inside one big fence.

Facebook compatibility, facial recognition algorithms, advanced editing features, and music lessons from the stars are just some of the improvements made to iVideo, iPhoto, GarageBand, and iWeb. Check out what's new in this First Look video. We've also got a slide show with even more iLife '09 goodness, and an in-depth review for iWork, Apple's productivity suite.

Jasmine posted her brief sneak peek at iLife '09 yesterday with a slide show, and it's pretty clear that major improvements have come to Apple's suite of lifestyle applications, most notably iPhoto '09, iMovie '09, and GarageBand '09. Since I'm an amateur photography nerd with aspirations of rock stardom, I'm most interested in iPhoto and GarageBand, though the new iMovie may be enough for me to whip out my Flip camcorder and record more than just dogs riding on skateboards. Of course, iWeb '09 has a few updates, too. I have just got through the iPhoto '09 face recognition hurdle, and am just starting on the rest of the iLife suite. So here's an in-depth look at the facial recognition bit of iPhoto, with more to come later.

iPhoto '09 Lets start with the belle of the ball, iPhoto '09. Why do I say that? Because the new Faces and Places feature on iPhoto '09 was definitely one of the biggest news out of Phil Schiller's Macworld keynote. While iPhoto '08 introduced Events, which lets you group photos based on the dates they were taken, iPhoto '09 introduced three new features that got the Mac community buzzing--facial recognition, geotagging, and social network support. For the facial recognition, you don't have to tag every single photo you have with a name and a face; the idea is that iPhoto '09 will be smart enough to do the facial recognition for you. However, it will only work after you do the necessary legwork to make it all happen.

Assuming you don't have photos in your iPhoto library already, you'll have to import them. Me, I have about 3,500 photos sitting in my Aperture library on the laptop, and that's not even counting the more than 10,000 photos I have in my external hard drive at home. So if you're a big photography dork like me, it'll take some time for all the photos to import over. Once that happens, you can immediately start identifying faces and names. Sometimes iPhoto will be smart enough to detect faces for you, and sometimes it won't be. If it does detect a face, it'll display a square over what it thinks is a face, with a placeholder name "unknown face" underneath it. If it doesn't detect a face, you'll have to hit the "Add Missing Face" button on the bottom left, select the face, and add a name. Once you identify a face with a name, you can go to the Faces corkboard, select a face, and iPhoto '09 will scout out your entire library to find photos with a similar face. Once it does, it's up to you to go through the results to confirm or not confirm if the photos really do show that person. This is how the facial recognition training works.

… Read more

Now, this is kind of neat: Facebook Connect, the sprawling social network's universal-login project, has started to come to desktop software. Namely, it's been hooked up to the Apple photo-management software iPhoto, per a post on the company developer blog.

"We are excited that sharing your photos with the people you care about has become even easier with iLife '09, Apple's new suite of applications that includes iPhoto '09," the post by Facebook platform manager Dave Morin said. "Users of iPhoto '09 can easily share and tag photos from iPhoto directly to Facebook. With … Read more