Apple last week announced the newest edition of its popular photo management software iPhoto. It comes bundled with iLife ’09, a suite of programs that includes the latest versions of iMovie, GarageBand, iWeb and iDVD.
Apple’s iPhoto provides Mac owners with a simple, user-friendly interface for organizing, editing, viewing and sharing photographs. It includes such features as manual and smart albums, keyword tagging, slideshows and the ability to order custom photo books, calendars, greeting cards and prints.
The updated iPhoto ’09 touts several new features, including:
- Faces – Uses face detection and face recognition technology to find all photographs of a person, then allows you to confirm them, label them with the person’s name and add them to an automatically updating Smart Album. You can then view all your Faces albums on a display that resembles Polaroid pictures on a corkboard.
- Places – Organizes photos by location using data from GPS-enabled cameras and iPhones or manually entered information. Places then allows you to view images by location, using either a map or list view.
- Slideshow themes – Six new themes — Classic, Shatter, Snapshots, Scrapbook, Ken Burns and Sliding Panels – make it easy to create attractive slideshows that can be viewed in iPhoto, as well exported to DVD, iPod and iPhone. Slideshows incorporate face detection to keep faces positioned correctly onscreen.
- Facebook and Flickr uploading – iPhoto has (finally) integrated direct exporting to Flickr and Facebook. The new iPhoto can also export your Faces data to Facebook — tagging and even notifying the people in your pictures – and your Places locations to Flickr.
- Better editing – iPhoto ’09 has updated some of its editing tools, including saturation, definition, retouching and auto red-eye.
- Travel maps – Apple photo books designed in iPhoto can now include maps that use your Places data to illustrate your travels.
Also included in iLife ’09 are iMovie, which lets you edit and combine videos you shoot with still images, special effects and music; GarageBand, for recording and mixing music; iWeb, for Web design and publishing; and iDVD, for watching and creating DVDs.
The iLife ’09 upgrade retails for $79 and requires the Mac 10.5.6 Leopard operating system or later. Family packs with five licenses are available for $99, and those who don’t have Leopard can purchase it bundled with iLife for $169.
Apple also makes Aperture, a photo management program specifically designed for professional photographers. Aperture 2 retails for $199.
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iPhoto ’09
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I’m happy to see this review. You explain it better than Apple did when they sent a pop-up on my iMac. The only part of this that interests me personally is the improvements to editing on iPhoto. I wonder if they will eventually give us those anyway. Thanks for the info!