iPhoto was updated today during Macworld 2009. It represents one of the three applications of the iLife suite that received major improvements in the newest version.
Apple has added two new ways to organize your photos in iPhoto. The first way is by Faces! It uses face detection and recognition features to assist in tagging the right people to the right photos. When iPhoto finds a new face it doesn’t yet recognize, you tell iPhoto who it is and iPhoto applies that person’s name to (almost) all photos they appear in. It will have difficulties always detecting the faces due to different angles or obstructions, but this will probably be the fastest way you’ve ever tagged a photo. Once iPhoto recognizes your friends and family, you can select the Faces library to see everyone you know. You’ll be able to double-click on their face to see all of the photos that they appear in – similar to how you work with Events today.
They’ve also provided organization by Places in addition to Faces and the existing Events. This uses GPS that is built into some cameras (i.e. iPhone) to automatically tag them with a location. You can set the location for photos by typing its name, entering an address, or dropping a pin on a map if your camera doesn’t support GPS. Then you can view your photos by location by selecting the Places library. This will provide you with two ways to look at your photos. You can either see pins on a map representing where your photos were taken or you can look at them using a column browser (similar to the Browser in iTunes with Genre, Artist, Album columns).
iPhoto also integrates with Facebook and Flickr now without the need for third-party plug-ins. As a bonus, if people on Facebook add names to the faces in your photos, that information is sent back to iPhoto. You can now out-source your photo library organization work to your friends!
Photo editing has been improved as well. A new slider has been added to the Adjust panel called Definition that tries to improve clarify and bring out detail. They’ve added the ability to change the saturation of your photos without affecting skin tones. The Retouch brush can now detect edges so that they aren’t blurred when you’re retouching a spot near them. And, finally, Apple has tweaked red-eye removal in iPhoto once again. This time they’re using their new face detection features so it only requires one click (hopefully it also does a better job of it).
Slideshows in iPhoto have also been upgraded with support for themes, using face detection to position photos and keep faces on screen, and support for syncing them to your iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV. Hopefully those devices will also be updated to support these new iPhoto Slideshows features, otherwise that means the slideshows will probably be unnecessarily large movie files once they’re exported to iTunes.
Apple has made a guided tour video available for iPhoto ’09.