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Having spent a few minutes with iPhoto ‘09 (instructed by an Apple employee who hadn’t spent much more time with it himself) here are a few answers about it.

First off, Faces doesn’t work with animals. You tag someone’s face by selecting a photo, clicking the “Face” button, and dragging a box around the area you want to identify as the, well, face (boy, can I see that getting abused in colleges). iPhoto ‘09 then churns through the photos, trying to identify other, similar facial features—and it takes a while, too. The iMac it was demonstrated on was spinning, like the iTunes Genius feature, when I got to the show room floor, and while it had begun to assemble pictures after I tagged a few pictures, it wasn’t finished when I left (there were about 1,000 photos total on the screen).

One question that was answered by one of the iPhoto experts on hand (he may have been a developer, but he was running around answering so many questions I didn’t have a chance to ask): Faces does not work with pets. You can tag Rover in photos if you like, but iPhoto won’t be able to determine if its your beloved pooch in photos.

Likewise, babies and children are apt to give Faces a lot of trouble.

Tagging a young boy as “Davey,” Faces pulled up a lot of photos of him, but also a lot of pictures of a similar-looking young girl (sister, perhaps?). The demonstrator suggested that tagging more photos of Davey would help iPhoto become more discerning in its selections, along with telling it whether its guessing right (via a yes or no box).

Likewise, when I tagged a newborn as “Little Jimmy,” Faces was unable to find even one match—again, right away—even though there were several more photos of the child in the same set. It has the easiest time with adults, I’m told.

Places will be familiar to anyone who’s played with Flickr geotagging: you get a map with pushpins, indicating where the photo was taken. Simple, easy.

One of the niftier features in my opinion is the online integration.  Not only can you upload to Facebook and Flickr (keeping your Faces and Places tagging intact), you can also “subscribe” to Facebook and Flickr albums within iPhoto, like subscribing to a Google Calendar in iCal.

If someone updates the album, the pictures are updated in iPhoto as well. Click on the iPhoto album, and you get an arrow link (like the iTunes store uses) that will take you to the online site.

Organizing, integrating, and sharing are the big “what’s new” with iPhoto ‘09. I can’t imagine rushing out to pay $79 for it ($99 for a five-member family pack), but once I do have it, I’ll have a heck of a lot of fun tagging everyone I know.

See announcement in our Macworld Expo keynote blog.

Product [iPhoto]