iLife, Lemurs, and Me

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

I am not a Lemur. I’m sure you can tell that from my picture (and I bet someone like BC finds a lemur picture for this blog within moments): A recent tour of the new iLife ‘09 with Apple reinforced this easy bit of species-identification in just a few moments – but I’m not entirely sure that the conclusion to my investigations is entirely flattering.

But first – those Lemurs. Apparently, Lemurs don’t recognise Leopards. Instead, they simply maintain a count of the number of nearby Lemurs. If this should decrement by 1, they run up a tree. So much easier than bothering to look for spots in the undergrowth, and big sharp teeth…

How does this relate to iLife? Easy. Faces. iPhoto ‘09 Does Things With Faces, in photographs, automatically matching up your photo library so you can view all the pictures linked by having one person’s face somewhere in them. If you can’t work out who someone is, then you can throw the photo up to Facebook and wait for someone to tag it. If the tagged face you don’t know is in more than one picture, then you get another person tile in your by-people view.

This feature was shown to a room full of writers and analysts, and it went down like a lead balloon. Apple were a trifle crestfallen; and I think I know why. I strongly suspect that writers, as a tribe, do not have lots of those “family pictures” scattered around their phones, cameras, laptops et cetera. If I had just grabbed a copy of iPhoto ‘09 and gone home with it I would very likely not have found this smart feature in a million years – because the fewer people there are in a photo, the more I like it. All those family shots, I just don’t understand – I think of them as “here’s the same troop of Lemurs, with a tiny rim of the Arc de Triomphe in the background”, and all those gurning faces just don’t connect for me.

From the reactions of the journalists in the room, I suspect I’m not alone in that clearly dysfunctional reaction. Apple fortunately provided a pre-loaded library of happy models, smiling for the camera in front of a wide selection of the world’s landmarks, so you can see for yourself the rather bizarre Godley & Creme pop-video effect of scrolling through all your pix of a particular person, with their eyes and mouth locked in position in the middle of each snap.

It creeps me out, really. Especially when my nephew scanned in a load of black and whites from my parents’ photo album, which stretches back to the 1900’s – and iPhoto tracked people through 50 years of life, unerringly. I also still have a massive server here, as yet untouched, packed with several gigabytes of capture frames from a large factory CCTV system. I wonder how long iPhoto would take to find frames in that lot with faces in?

My suspicion is that Family type people will come up with some equally disparaging term for us loners, to balance out my “Lemur” tag, and will think this is just a brilliant tool for turning casual snaps into a lifetime’s documentary: but I can’t help worrying a little bit about what could be done with something this capable.