iPhoto '09, A Glorious App for Disorganized Photographers

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying my new iPhoto program, part of the iLife ’09 bundle I purchased for $99 CAD at my local Apple vendor.

Like most folks, I’ve got thousand of unorganized photos culled from various computers, cameras and file systems over the years. They move from one drive to another, renamed, shrunk for web and dotted throughout my pictures folder.

The initial import was a breeze, a one-click ‘import to library’ function typical of most Apple programs. The photos are arranged in a beautiful graphical format. You can modify the size of the thumbnails in the gallery and easily expand to view full-size and back again.

The Faces feature is one of my favourites. It uses a newly developed facial recognition software. You begin by inputting the name of the subject in the photo and the program will scan the rest of your photos and suggest other instances where that face appears. The more examples you have of that face, the more precise the selections will be. It’s not foolproof but it is pretty darn accurate, and managed to accurately scan and group photos of my children over the years, right back to infancy.

Sharing is super-easy, with one-click interfaces for email, flickr and facebook. Simply select the photos you wish to email and choose what size you’d like to send the photos, iPhoto does the rest of the work. Create an album for facebook and flickr and it will batch upload the entire album to the account you’ve assigned.

You can flag or hide photos, sort, title and rate them. You can add location data, keywords and descriptions. You can send to iWeb, iDVD or simply burn to CD. You can even fix red-eye and build cards, calendars and other mementos, then order direct from the program.

My only complaint is its lack of duplicate finder capability. While it was easy enough for me to sort the photos by date and click and delete duplicate files by hand, it seems like it could be even easier, given the strengths of the rest of the program. All in all though, I’m loving my iPhoto ’09 by Apple, and if you’re a photographer or collector of snapshots, you’ll love it too.