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For those of you who haven’t been living under a rock this past week, you’re aware of Apple’s new and improved iPhoto application that will come out with iLife ‘09 later this month. This update, which requires Leopard 10.5.6 or higher, brings a couple of exciting features such as Places and Faces (which are a nice addition to Events from the last version). These updates, as well as some other ones, will bring a lot more functionality to iPhoto, and I am really looking forward to this software. What exactly should you expect to see with this new software? Other than some improved editing features, there are some other major updates. Read on to find out.

New Features

Places: One of the hot new trends in the photography world is geo-tagging photos with the coordinates where they were taken. Some cameras now even come with GPS installed in them to help with this process. With the new iPhoto, you cannot only take advantage of this data that is embedded in your images, but iPhoto will automatically see it and show where it is on a nice graphical map. If you don’t have a GPS enabled camera or add on device, you can tag the photos yourself using a city name, address, or any other location. Apple describes this new feature as such:

Places automatically imports photo location data from a GPS-enabled camera or any iPhone or you can manually assign a location to any photo, group of photos or event. Once iPhoto knows where photos were taken, you can easily explore them with a simple search or an interactive map.

Faces: This new feature finds and scans human faces on imported photos based on face recognition technology. Once it scans a few examples of the same face with some helps from the user, it will automatically find the rest of the photos in the library that contain that face. If it is unsure, there is a process that allows users to confirm or deny whether or not the specific face in question does appear in that photo. With all of these scanned photos, iPhoto ‘09 creates new albums based on the people who appear in the photo to make it even easier to find them in your album. Here is Apple’s description:

iPhoto automatically scans photos to detect people’s faces and when you assign a name to any face iPhoto will automatically find more pictures of that person. The library can be searched by name or browsed using the new Faces View.

Online Sharing: If you use Flickr or Facebook at all, then you’re going to love the new iPhoto, which comes with integration with both of these. For Flickr, you can simply upload images straight from iPhoto now instead of having to use the web client or another piece of third party software such as Flickr Uploadr. Furthermore, the geo-tagging on these pictures will also be imported into Flickr. However, the Facebook part of this feature is more exciting. With the new Faces feature, uploaded images to Facebook automatically are tagged according to the Faces you have tagged in iPhoto. If anyone adds a tag to the photos you upload, they can automatically be synced back down to your local library, which can save a ton of time. Apple has this to say:

iPhoto ’09 lets you easily publish photos to Facebook or Flickr. Photos published to Facebook include assigned names, and name tags added on Facebook sync back to iPhoto.

Themed Slideshows: With six built in themes, making slideshows in iPhoto ‘09 is even simpler than before. These themes automatically use Classic, Shatter, Snapshots, Scrapbook, Ken Burns, and Sliding Panels transitions. And with the new Faces technology, iPhoto will also find faces in the image and make sure they remain in the viewable portion of the photo no matter where it fades or slides to, which is pretty awesome. On top of this, a filmstrip on the bottom lets users easily navigate between photos. Apple says:

You can also share photos by creating a themed slideshow to play on your Mac, iPhone or iPod, or create a beautiful travel book, complete with customized maps of your journey.

What to Expect

With all of these new features, iPhoto ‘09 will not be one to disappoint. With new competition from Picasa, these updates will help to keep iPhoto on top. The features I am most looking forward to are the Flickr and Facebook integration, as they will save me endless amounts of time of switching between applications and such. I have always found the older iPhoto to be a little feature lacking, but now I am thinking more and more about making it my main photo application. How about you?

Product [iPhoto ‘09] Via [Apple PR]