I’ve spent most of my free time last week in front of iPhoto. Aside from tagging faces with their names, I also have a lot of fun tagging photos with their location. This iPhoto feature is called Places, and it’s the ability to organize photos based on where they’re taken. Places is a nice example of integrating Google Map to an application.

Let’s go Places

I’m not much of a traveller myself – yet – so I could only imagine how cool this feature will be for those travelling photographers. I don’t own a GPS-enabled camera either, so imagine again, if I did because Places supports geotagged photos.

I could, however, tag my existing photo collection. All I need are some free time and a decent internet connection.

Photos are usually grouped by events, and every photo in each event is usually taken at the same location. So, to start tagging photos with their location, the best place to start is “Events” under the “Library” menu.

Select an event and click the small “i” sign on the bottom right corner of the event box. It will appear when you hover your mouse near the corner. Alternatively, you could select the event and go to “File –> Get Info” or hit “Control + I”.

An info box with some basic information about the event will appear. You could edit the event’s description and location here.

Every time you edit the place, iPhoto will offer you to find that location on a map.

After few seconds of searching, a map will automatically appear. The location that you’ve searched will be pointed with a pin. Click “Assign to event” button and all the photos in the event will be tagged with that location.

If you are not sure whether the pin really pointed to the correct location, you could zoom in the map by double clicking on it or by clicking on the “plus” (+) button on the bottom left of the screen. You could also choose to view the map by Terrain, Satellite, or Hybrid (combination of both).

If there are several locations within one event, you could tag individual photos with different places. All you have to do is select pictures with similar location, and repeat the above process.

Finding the missing places

One of the (dis)advantages of living in an “unknown” part of the world is that, most of the times, the location you’ve entered can not be found by the map search.

If this is the case, you have to locate the places yourself. Rediscovering places in the map is fun. Drag the map to center the position of the approximate location and click “Drop Pin” button.

To place the pin in the exact point, zoom in on the map and drag the head of the pin to the desired position. You could also set the size of the area by sliding the arrows that appear by the sides of the circle.

The final step is writing down the name of that place.

Organizing by Places

After the fun part is done, we can continue with even more fun: enjoying the photos based on the places. Zoom in on the area that you want to explore and click “Show Photos”. All the photos taken within the range of that map will be shown on the screen.

Or, instead of “Map” view, you could also choose “Thumbnail” view where you’re given the option of narrowing down the on the location.

Surely, with a GPS-enabled camera, all the geotagging would be done automatically. And those adventurers who travel a lot will have their map filled with pins. How exciting!

Do you go places and take pictures? Do geotag your photos to organize them? Share your adventures using the comments below.

• Use Face Recognition to Organize Photos With iPhoto [Mac] (5)
• Manage your iPhoto with these plugins (11)
• Windows 7 Libraries Explained – And Why You Want Them (51)
• Share Your Trips With EveryTrail (8)
• Photology – Must-have Photo Search Software for Windows (3)

With today’s limit set at terabytes, you can literary store millions of photos. Our problem now is not choosing what to shoot, but how to organize the photos afterward.

For most amateur photographers, the term “organizing photos” goes as far as collecting them into albums based on events, or maybe by the people in the images. While grouping photos chronologically by events is often done easily and automatically every time you move the photos from the camera to computer, sorting photos based on the people in each picture is not as easy as it sounds. Especially if you have to do it manually.

Recognizing the faces

The mundane task of how to organize photos can now be done easily and almost automatically using iPhoto. This photo management application that comes with iLife suite offers its users the ability to assign names to faces and organize the pictures based on the person in the photos.

This feature is called Faces. And using it, users can click and open every photo that contain a specific person in all of them.

The first step to enable Faces is to choose a picture with a person in it.

Then click the “Name” icon located on the bottom left of iPhoto’s window.

The chosen picture will be enlarged to fill the window. Click the “Add Missing Face” button that replaced the “Name” icon.

You’ll see that iPhoto will try its best to locate faces inside the picture. A square will appear around the faces with the tag “unnamed” below it.

All you have to do is double-click the tag and replace “unnamed” with that person’s name.

Repeat the process for other “unnamed” tags, and you can continue to do the same for other pictures with faces of different people.

From here on, things will get easier because iPhoto will help you by trying to recognize the same faces that have been tagged before. If you choose a photo with a previously tagged person in it, iPhoto will ask you to confirm the name.

Click the check mark to confirm or the cross to tell iPhoto that the name is incorrect.

However, no machine can replace the human ability to recognize faces. The Faces feature of iPhoto is amazing indeed, but it still makes stupid mistakes here and there. Once it thought that my little daughter’s dress was a face.

Mass naming the faces

If you have thousands of pictures, it’s possible that you’d be wiping off cold sweat right now thinking about renaming faces thousands of times. But you don’t have to be afraid, because iPhoto provides you with a way to do it almost automatically. Almost, but still better than having do it manually one photo at a time.

Click “Faces” on the left pane and choose one of the faces appear on the right.

While you are at it, you can edit the person’s full name and add email address to each face by choosing “File –> Get Info” menu or Command + I or by clicking the small “i” icon at the right bottom of the image.

After choosing a person, the screen will show you all the photos with that person in them. If you scroll down a little bit, you will see the second half of the screen labelled “So-and-so may also be in the photos below”.

Choose a close up view and “Confirm Name” from the bottom menu.

All the photos will focus on the possible faces of the chosen person. Your job is to click on every frame with the correct image to confirm the name to the faces. You could minimize or enlarge the size of the box by moving the slider, located at the bottom right of the screen.

There are other cool iPhoto abilities but we’ll save them for another time.

Do you use iPhoto to manage your photos? Do you know of other alternative photo management applications for Mac? Share using the comments below.

• Use Geographical Info To Organize Photos in iPhoto [Mac] (1)
• Manage your iPhoto with these plugins (11)
• [Google Picasa 101] – Saving, Exporting & Uploading To Picasa Web Albums (6)
• [Google Picasa 101] – Master The Special Effects In Picasa (16)
• [Google Picasa 101] – How To Edit Your Photos (14)

Gawker is a free application which your iSight uses to create time-lapse movies. As with all time-lapse movies, it uses a collection of photos taken within an interval (every 10 seconds, for example) and combines them to form a video.

Gawker’s party piece is: it does it all for you! Upon running Gawker, it searches for your iSight; and using Bonjour, it will also locate other shared iSights on your network! Yup, it allows remote webcam viewing (I’ll come back to that later).

Using Gawker is pretty easy once you figure out what it can do. Within its main application window, it lists the iSights which you can connect to. Shared remote webcams located via Bonjour will also be listed here. Clicking on them will bring up a preview window showing you what is going on through the iSight.

Here’s where the fun begins. If you click on ‘More’, you will find some interesting options. You may set a particular time for Gawker to start and stop recording, so that it won’t need to run the entire day – only at the specified times. You may also choose to share your iSight with someone else running Gawker, set the broadcast interval and a password in order to connect to you (optional). After you’re done setting up, hit ‘Record’ and let the magic work.

Like I said, Gawker’s party piece is it automatically creates a time-lapse movie. It doesn’t just take a picture within the preset interval – leaving you with a folder full of images, having to click through them individually. After Gawker is done recording, all you’re left with is a video file. Quick and hassle-free! Gawker is also powerful enough to record streams from up to four separate webcams and combine them in the final time-lapse video.

Possible usages for Gawker:

Another useful application is EyeSight. It also allows you to take time-lapse pictures between an interval from seconds to days. You can choose the output format of the images (from PNG, JPG, TIFF & BMP) and its size (640 x 480 and below).

Besides that, EyeSight provides you with the option of uploading your pictures to an FTP server, so that you gain access to them from anywhere instantaneously.

Gawker and EyeSight are both available for free to run on Mac OS X.

What else do you do with your Webcam? Have you found other uses for them? Let us know in the comments.

• Manage your iPhoto with these plugins (11)
• Free Alternatives to 10 Popular Commercial Mac Applications (Part2) (13)
• VZOChat – How To Videoconference with Your Cameraphone Webcam (12)
• Use Pixer for Easier Image Batch-resize Tasks [Mac Only] (4)
• Use Geographical Info To Organize Photos in iPhoto [Mac] (1)

It does however (sometimes), turn out to be a pain in the ass.

By using a front-line application over your photo collection essentially hides the original files from view. Things may seem fine on the surface, but beneath the application, it could be messier that it seems. And when iPhoto automatically manages your files, that means that you don’t really have full control over the details. To power-freaks, that spells disaster.

I’ve found several plugins which seems to make things more manageable, these are my favorites.

1. PictureSync

This little application helps ease the process of batch uploading pictures over to online albums like Flickr, Zooomr and even Facebook. It support loads of online services which include:

• Flickr
• Fotki
• ipernity
• FotoTime
• 23
• Shutterfly
• Zooomr
• Buzznet
• Dripbook
• Webshots
• Smugmug
• Gallery G2
• Kodak Gallery
• Photobucket
• Textramerica
• and VOX

As PictureSync is a stand-alone application, it doesn’t only just work with iPhoto. You may drag-and-drop files from anywhere into it and it’s even integrated with Aperture and Lightroom.

PictureSync is also available for Windows here.

If you are only interested in uploading photos to Flickr directly and you don’t really need any extra applications, then this next plugin is for you (probably needs no introduction).

2. Free Flickr eXporter (FFXporter)

Integrated neatly within iPhoto, this plugin allows you to select the photos you wish to upload and simply choosing ‘Export’ from the File menu. It preserves EXIF data and all other iPhoto descriptions, keywords and ratings.

FFXporter is a free alternative to the widely-known shareware FlickrExport. It may not have the same pretty interface (FlickrExport allows you to preview the photos you are about to upload, whereas FFXporter will only show the number of photos) but it performs the job just as well.

Mark wrote an interesting article about how you can do the opposite — download photos from Flickr!

Two other plugins worth mentioning at this point is for BubbleShare and Facebook Exporter. The Facebook plugin is pretty much is self-explanatory. BubbleShare is an online photosharing service, much like Flickr. But BubbleShare offers unlimited storage and it’s free.

3. Flash Album Exporter

This is an exciting little plugin. Generally, it will take the photos selected in iPhoto and generate a Flash photo album and a .html page for you. Everything is then placed within a folder so uploading it to your website is easy peasy. So remember, to use this plugin, you must have your own file-hosting service.

You may choose from 6 different album styles – SimpleViewer, PostcardViewer, AutoViewer, BananAlbum, GreyBox and LightBox. All of which are pretty sexy. I doubt there is an easier way to create gorgeous online photo albums (if you know any other method, share it in the comments). Mark (again) wrote a similar article about this for Windows users.

4. Duplicate Annihilator

Back to the control freaks. Sometimes, the thought of having duplicates in my photo album drives me insane. I need my stuff ORGANIZED the way I want it. Medically speaking, it’s a slight tilt towards Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD, for short). The fact that iPhoto has 2 folders (Originals and Modified) doesn’t help. Yes, I realize that it keeps the original files just in case I need to revert the photo back into its unmodified state but over years and after thousands of photos, those original files tends to take up a lot of unneeded space.

Duplicate Annihilator uses some sort of algorithm to automagically rid me of duplicate photos from my library. It does this by comparing filenames, file sizes, EXIF creation date and eventually slims down the whole iPhoto library. Without the extra burden, iPhoto loads a little bit quicker.

5. GrowlPhoto

“Ting, your import is complete.” GrowlPhoto is nothing more than a Growl plugin for iPhoto. It notifies you when the import process is complete. Simple yet precious.

(By) Jackson Chung is a full-time med student attempting to perform a juggling act with relationship, studies and his future. He also manages a Mac news site, Macnifying.

• 5 Ways to Create Beautiful Slideshows of your Digital Pictures (15)
• Download Photos from Flickr with FlickrDown (13)
• 6 Quick Ways to JAZZ-UP your Photos (23)
• 5 Little Mac Apps That Flickr Will Thank You For (14)
• 2 Great Ways To Automate Set Management In Flickr (1)