Hello from the emerald isle, Ireland! I am in the middle of moving to Ireland from South Africa and as I settle in I’ll be a wee bit busy. From what I have seen so far through the rain, mist and wind this is a beautiful country.

I have a few longer posts nearing completion for ilikecameras but for today you are going to have to make do with a couple of odds and ends.

Riya recognises faces

If you ever suffer from unlabelled family or group photos then head on over to Riya and try out their face-recognition technology. As you upload photos Riya learns to recognise people and makes finding photos with your Aunt Wilma that much easier. It also has text-recognition so any photos with signs in them will become searchable.

What with all the focus on tagging and metadata for photo organisation one can end up spending more time tagging photos than taking. Face, text and other automatic technologies could certainly help fill out those tags. Throw in GPS on cameras and we will have location data too. In a few years will we have to tag a single photo ever again? To a large degree no, automatic systems will do 90%, but I think there will always be the human element to add depth and character to our photos. I don’t foresee technology recognising it was your son’s first birthday or how you trekked 50 miles through rain, mud, sleet and ice to get that perfect dawn shot.

Aperture vs. Photoshop

ilikecameras was quick on announcing Apple Aperture and the buzz around the web has been huge as people itch to get their hands on it. Probably the most repeated statement I see is that Aperture is going to take users away from Photoshop. That is largely untrue, they aren’t competing products. About the most advanced editing feature Aperture has is Levels adjustment. From what I can see there are no Curves, Channel Mixers, Layer Adjustments, brushes and other complex filters, all of which Photoshop has.

Aperture is an organisation or management tool for photos. To me it is something I’ll use to springboard into Photoshop. At the most Aperture will be used to do broad and quick changes to sketch out a look and feel for a day’s shooting. Once that is done then you can go into Photoshop and pile on the power.

Aperture competes more fully with tools like ACDSee Pro Photo Manager, Extensis Portfolio and iView MediaPro. To some extent it also competes with Adobe Photoshop Elements though that still has more editing control than Aperture.

So stop uninstalling Photoshop but do go and give Aperture a try alongside it.

Wire free

Canon have released the Canon PowerShot SD430 compact camera. Its highlight is built-in wireless (WiFi) support which we can expect to be a big feature seller in the coming months. Wireless in compacts may not currently be a very practical feature but I am all for it as WiFi networks are rolled out through various cities. As far as I know this will also provide an alernative to GPS for location mapping which is something I want yesterday. Another potential use is at a wedding where guests can stream photos off of their cameras straight onto a provided computer which the bride and groom can then use to have a lovely photo gallery of their special day.

Odds and Ends

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2005 has been announced and the winning photo is quite stunning.

For Flickr users looking for a way to print their photos then Qoop is getting some good buzz. Qoop lets you select a range of photos and print them into a booklet which is quite customisable. While on printing the New York Times has an article on how home printing is costlier than at a photo lab which is counter to what the printer manufacturers all say.

And to end off you can go have a look at some four gigapixel photographs. Crikey!

* Lead photo by Jennifer Arning