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4. Faces and Places > Places
Geotagging is the latest hot feature of digital photography. That’s when your camera buries longitude and latitude coordinates into each picture it takes (invisibly, the same way it stamps the time and date) so you’ll always be able to pinpoint where a picture was taken.
There are only two problems with this scenario.
First, very few cameras actually contain the necessary GPS circuitry to geotag your photos. Second, what happens after you geotag your photos? What are you going to do, say, “Oh, yes, I remember that romantic evening at +41° 30' 18.48? N, -81° 41' 55.08? W??
iPhoto solves the second problem, at least. It translates those coordinates to the much more recognizable “Cleveland,” or even more precisely, a street address, like “100 Alfred Lerner Way, Cleveland, Ohio” (which happens to be the address of Cleveland Browns Stadium)—and shows that spot with a red pin on a map right in iPhoto.
This can be really convenient if you’ve made several trips to London and want to see all the pictures taken there over the years, and not just ones from a particular album or Event. It’s also a great way to learn geography—slideshows, books, and calendars take advantage of this info, and include themes that make a quick map of your trip.
Your photos are probably geotagged when you shoot them if you’re using one of the following gadgets:
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A digital camera with a built-in GPS chip, like the Nikon Coolpix P6000.
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The Eye-Fi Geo Card. It’s a remarkable SD memory card, the kind you put into most camera models, with built-in wireless networking and a pseudo-GPS feature ($70 for a 4 GB card). See www.eye.fi for details.
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A small GPS-enabled box like the $90 ATP PhotoFinder that tracks the time and your coordinates as you snap photos—and marries them up with the time stamps on your pictures when you insert the camera’s memory card. See http://photofinder.atpinc.com for more information.
If that’s your situation, then all you have to do is import the pictures into iPhoto (Getting Your Pictures into iPhoto) and smile smugly. When the images appear in the viewing window, you can check the location by clicking the Info button on the iPhoto toolbar to open the Info panel shown in Figure 4-12.
In the Places section of the Info panel, you can see the location’s name and a pin on a miniature Google map; if the map is generally correct, then iPhoto has done its job.
However, GPS coordinates can sometimes be off by yards. Or, if the place is wrong and you know it (because you forgot to turn on the Location Services function of your iPhone, for example), don’t worry; You can manually assign the photo to a place, as described in the next section.
But what about photos that don’t have geographical information embedded—like the 300 billion photos that have been taken with non-GPS cameras?
Figure 4-12. Various tidbits appear in the Info panel’s Places section, including the photo’s name (probably something creative like IMG_4576.JPG), the date it was taken, and the place where the photo was snapped. Just click the little globe icon to see a tiny Google map bearing a red pin marking the spot where you took the photo. Neat! If all the photos in an Event have been geotagged, you get a map with multiple pins showing the various locations, as shown here.
In that case, you can geotag them manually.
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Select a photo (or an Event) and then click the Info button on the iPhoto tool-bar.
The Info panel opens to reveal several bits of information, including the name of the picture.
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Click “Assign a Place” and start typing the name of the town, city, or landmark (like Washington Monument) where the picture was taken.
As shown in Figure 4-13, a pop-up menu appears; iPhoto is trying to guess what you’re typing, to save you some effort (and spelling). If you see the location in the list, use the arrow keys on the keyboard to select it and then press Return to confirm your choice, or just click the correct location in the list.
Tip
If, by some bizarre occurrence, you have the latitude and longitude of your location, you can enter those numbers instead of a name. Click “Assign a Place” and then type the coordinates separated by a comma, such as 38, –9 (the latitude always goes first). A pop-up menu appears with iPhoto’s guess as to where on the map those coordinates actually are.
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If the place you’re typing doesn’t appear on the list, pick one that’s close and then move the marker pin.
Unlike the previous version of the program, iPhoto ’11 doesn’t have a “Find on Map” option, mainly because you don’t need it. In the off chance that iPhoto and Google can’t find your location, just pick a spot that’s close. Then, click the red pin on the little map and drag it to the correct location, as Figure 4-14 shows.
Note
You can only move marker pins using the tiny map in the Info panel; you can’t move them when you’re looking at the big map in Places view.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: When You Don’t Feel Like Sharing
I’m all for having machines do things for me automatically, but what if I don’t want iPhoto revealing where my iPhone pictures were snapped?
These days, privacy concerns run deep; sometimes, you may not want iPhoto blabbing about where you’ve been.
If this is the case, you have a couple of options. The first one—if you remember to do it in time—is to turn off the GPS feature on your camera or cameraphone. On the iPhone, for example, go to the Home screen and tap your way through Settings?General?Location Services?Off. (Just remember to turn Location Services back on again the next time you want to use Maps or another location-aware app.)
Second, you can tell iPhoto itself not to look up the GPS coordinates embedded in the file. Choose iPhoto?Preferences (or press ?-comma) and then click the Advanced icon. In the “Look up Places” pop-up menu, change Automatically to Never, and then click OK.
Also, new in iPhoto ’11 is the option to have iPhoto keep locations secret for published photos only (those you send off to photo-sharing websites like Facebook, Flickr, and so on). If that sounds more agreeable, you can leave the “Look up Places” menu set to Automatically and then turn off “Include location information for published photos” underneath it.
However, if you’re part of the Witness Protection Program, you might want to delete location information that’s already been added to a photo or Event. Just click the Info icon in the iPhoto toolbar to summon the Info panel and then click Places to expand that section. Then click the location tag and click the
to its right, shown in Figure 4-14. To delete location info for multiple photos or Events, just select them using the techniques described on Selecting Photos first.
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When the pin is in the right spot, click the
next to the location tag to confirm it.
You can also refine and/or delete locations by choosing Window?Manage My Places. This command summons a list of all the places you’ve tagged in iPhoto—or captured by your GPS-enabled phone or camera—with a handy map that lets you move location pins to and fro, as well as reduce or widen the region of a particular pin using tiny left and right triangles that automatically appear to its right.
The Geotagging photos approach is usually enough for most people. But if you want to add a personal touch to your locations, you can rename them in the Info panel.
Once iPhoto finds your location (or you find it yourself),
click the marker pin to summon the location tag (the marker pin
turns yellow). Once the tag appears, highlight it and then type a
new name, such as Grandma’s House. Click the
to confirm the new name (or just press
Return). Later, you’ll be able to use iPhoto’s Search box to round
up all the pictures that were taken at Grandma’s House, just by
typing grandm.
Tip
Once you’ve pinpointed the right location for a photo, you can copy that info to other photos. Just select the photo with the correct locale and then choose Edit?Copy. Next, select the photo(s) you want to copy the location to and then choose Edit?Paste Location. That’s all there is to it.
Figure 4-14. If you don’t see your locale on the list, pick a place that’s close and then fine-tune it by moving the pin on the map. Drag the pin to the correct location and then click the pin to rename it (it turns yellow). If you’re lucky, iPhoto updates the location tag itself (in this example, iPhoto changed the location to Estoril), though in most cases you have to type the info in yourself. You can zoom in and out of the map as needed with the buttons labeled here. You can also drag the map itself to see another area.
As you may have noticed, the Info panel has room for more facts than just a photo’s spot on the map. Here’s a quick roundup of what the other controls shown in Figure 4-15 can do for you:
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Rename the photo. If you’re tired of all your pictures being called IMG_this or DSC_that, then click the Name field near the top of the Info panel (below the white box) and type in a better title, like Baby’s first Jell-O parfait or Bath time!
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Rate the photo. See those dark stars next to the photo’s name? Drag your cursor mouse along them to add the number of stars you think the picture deserves. (See Ratings for details on ratings.)
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Add a description. Along with a better title, you can also add details about what’s in the photo: “Stevie’s first at-bat in the T-ball game” or “Toboggan accident Day 3.” Just click where it says “Add a description” and start typing.
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Zoom the map. Just below the map, click the
and
buttons to zoom in and out of the image, anywhere from a closeup street view to a world map. (These controls appear when your cursor is on the map.)
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View on the Places map. Next to the location tag is a tiny arrow
that you can click to see the location on iPhoto’s Places map. (This tiny arrow is labeled back in Figure 4-14.)
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Change the look of the map. When you point to the tiny map, a row of labeled buttons appears near the bottom. They let you see the location three different ways: a cartographical Terrain view that shows street names and elevations, a Satellite view with an overhead photo of the area, or Hybrid—a combination of both.
Tip
Once you’ve geotagged your photos, you can use iPhoto’s Search box to find them.
First, click Events or a particular album in the Source list. Then,
at the bottom of the iPhoto window, click the Search icon
() and type what you’re looking for, like
San Francisco or Wrigley
Field. Press Return to see your results.
Now that your photos are geotagged, detailed, and ready, it’s
time to see how they look in iPhoto’s Places view. In the Source list,
click Places. Or, if the Info panel is open, click in your photo’s location tag (labeled back in
Figure 4-14).
Tip
Once iPhoto knows where your pictures were taken—because you’ve geotagged them—that information is preserved if you upload the pictures to Flickr (Flickr). That means your admirers will be able to see where you took those photos using Flickr’s geotag maps—if you haven’t turned off the new location privacy option in iPhoto ’11’s preferences, that is (see the box on When You Don’t Feel Like Sharing).
In the Places map view shown in Figure 4-16, a global map
fills your screen, festooned with little red pins representing all
the pictures you’ve geotagged. (If you click iPhoto ’11’s new Full
Screen button, the map takes over your whole monitor!) To see the
photos attached to a pin, point to that pin and click the
next to the place’s name.
Here are some ways to navigate the map:
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Zoom in by double-clicking a pin until you get as close as you want.
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Zoom out of the map by Control-clicking (or right-clicking) twice.
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Zoom in or out by dragging the slider near the bottom-left of the iPhoto toolbar.
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If you want to travel more incrementally, drag the map itself with the mouse to get to the part you want to see.
Figure 4-15. Top: A photo’s Info panel can store quite a bit of information about it—like names, dates, and ratings—which you can use for searching or making smart albums. Bottom: You also get a choice of map styles, as shown here. The left image shows Satellite view, and the right Hybrid view (the top image shows Terrain view).
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See all your pins on the map at once by clicking the Home button at the top left of the iPhoto window (it looks like a little house).
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See all the countries, states, cities, and places you’ve visited by clicking the floating lists at the top of the map. These lists are new in iPhoto ’11; they let you view photos by region, as discussed in the next section.
Along the top-right edge of the iPhoto window are buttons for the same three map types you can see in the Info panel’s mini-map: Terrain, Satellite, and Hybrid (see Figure 4-15).
To see all the photos you’ve mapped, click the Show Photos button at the bottom of the iPhoto window.
The map view is fun and all, but sometimes you want to see all your Places information grouped together in a good, old-fashioned list. Easy: Use the new floating lists at the top of the Places map, shown in Figure 4-17.
Longtime fans of iTunes should instantly recognize this look: a series of lists in the top part of the window, and the locations (countries, states, cities, or places—not songs) in each list underneath. Four columns appear in the top part of the window, breaking down each location into smaller and smaller subcategories.
As shown in Figure 4-17 (top), the left-hand column has the big overall location: the individual countries where you’ve tagged photos. As you move to the right, countries get divided into states or provinces, which get narrowed down to cities or towns (Figure 4-17, middle). It can get as specific as a street address or a landmark, if you’ve gone that far in your geotagging frenzy.
Figure 4-17. It’s like iTunes for pictures! These new floating lists let you see Places information by country, state/province, town, and even down to a landmark, making it easy to pull out all the photos from a certain location. To see all the places you’ve pinned in Portugal, for example, click Portugal in the Countries column. To drill down to see all the photos taken in a particular city, click the city’s name in the Cities column. Keep clicking across the columns to get to just the markers pinned in a certain town or location. To see the photos pinned to a certain spot, click the pin and then click the tiny right-pointing arrow to its right (or click the Show Photos button in the iPhoto toolbar).
Want a self-updating album of all the photos in a certain state or city? Smart albums (Merging Albums) play nice with Places, too. Setting up a location-aware smart album is easier than ever in iPhoto ’11, as long as you have an Internet connection to keep the map info flowing from Google.
To set up a smart album based on location, follow these steps:
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In your Source list, click Places and then click the Home button at the upper left of the map.
Your own personal map of the world appears, complete with a red pin for every location you’ve tagged in a photo.
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Find the location you want using the floating region columns, or drill down through the lists until you find a specific location. Then click its red pin.
If you’re making a smart album to contain all the photos you’ve ever taken in Italy, choose it from the Country list (Figure 4-18).
If you’re making a smart album based on Florence, you can drill down through the other region lists until you find a marker pin for Florence, and then click it. In a big blast of colorful contrast, the red pin turns yellow.
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Click the Smart Album icon at the bottom of the window.
A fresh, new smart album appears in the Source list based on the pins shown on your map, sporting the name of the location you just chose.
Tip
To make a smart album based on multiple locations, zoom in until the map shows all the pinned places you want to include. Then click the Smart Album button in the iPhoto toolbar to make a self-updating album that includes photos from all those places. It appears in the Source list under an unwieldy name like “United Kingdom, France and more” but you can click to rename it something a little catchier, like “Europe.”
Figure 4-18. To make a smart album based on a country, you can use iPhoto ’11’s new floating region lists. Simply choose a country (or state, or city) and then click the Smart Album button in the iPhoto toolbar. Over in your Source list, you’ll find a new smart album named after the country you chose.
If you don’t happen to be online at the time (the horror!), you can still set up a smart album without looking at the map:
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Option-click the Create button in the iPhoto toolbar. From the shortcut menu, choose Smart Album.
The Smart Album sheet slides down from the top of the iPhoto window.
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Type a name for the album. Set up the pop-up menus to say “Place” and “contains.” In the remaining box, type the location you want to use, like Texas or Grand Canyon, and then click OK.
Your new smart album rounds up all the photos that match the Place criteria you entered. It also keeps an eye out for photos with matching geotags that may arrive in the future.
Tip
You can commemorate all this geotagging work with a custom map that can be added to a book of your photos. Choose a Page Layout has the details.
