Well first impressions of iPhoto 09 are generally good. The interface is very similar to iPhoto 08 which from memory was a big improvement from 06, there are two major new features, faces and places. The “face’s” feature searches your pictures and tries to match people and group them together is pretty accurate. On first run however it does take some time analysing your photo collection, which if you have a lot of photos seems to take for ever, however whilst this is going on in the background you can still play with some of the other new features. You get chance to confirm that the photo does actually include your named people and this seems to increase the accuracy as you name and confirm/reject more and more people/photos. On the whole the pictures it got wrong on first run I could understand why this happened, if you have family members with similar facial features or partially obscured faces for example.
The “places” feature however wasn’t so intuitive, although I fully admit I may of been doing something wrong. I decided to tag the photo’s of my house and update their location to the exact spot. The search for a location I found very disappointing. The search links through to google maps and I would expected to be able to search via postcode (zip code) or street name just like on google maps. This gave no results so I was forced to search by town name then manually kick on “new place” and move the marker pin. When I did this for the house and later tried to tag some more photo’s to the same location I had to repeat this step! However doing this a third time it seemed to have remembered, but this seems hit and miss. However this feature is pretty cool when you start plotting on the holiday photos and you can see where in the world you’ve been. Gimmicky I know but I like it.
All in all iPhoto 09 is definite improvement over 08 and I’m sure there are many more fun feature for me to find once I scratch the surface a little more. Faces works amazingly and places is ok but I would like to see some extra features especially on the search and save place. I’m yet to try it with geo-tagged photo’s but I imagine this works pretty well, as there is very little to go wrong in that! I’ll hold fire on recommending an upgrade of iLife based on iPhoto alone until I’ve had chance to review and play with a couple more of the products.
