Twenty-two years after Madonna sang “Who’s That Girl?” iPhoto ’09 uses facial recognition to organize your photos based on who’s in them. With an Event or album selected, you click the new Name button in the toolbar to get started. iPhoto looks for faces in your photos, and you type in the name of each unknown face to “teach” the app to recognize your friends and loved (or at least photographed) ones. In our tests, it occasionally mistook part of the background for a face, and often missed faces wearing sunglasses or ski goggles. You can draw frames around faces it misses or people who are facing away from the camera, and tag them manually, however.

 

Your friends live on the corkboard-we got iPhoto to recognize our cats after we tagged them over and over, but so far no luck with our canine pals.

Everyone you’ve tagged appears on the corkboard when you click Faces in the sidebar--click them to see all the photos you tagged of that person, along with iPhoto’s best guesses for what other photos they appear in, then click the Confirm Name button and either confirm or reject each guess. The more you tag and confirm, the more dead-on the guesses get--no facial recognition is 100 percent accurate, except maybe the CIA’s, and they’re not sharing.

Places lets you look at a terrain map, satellite image, hybrid, or a normal list view. 

The other big new feature, Places, uses the latitude and longitude data recorded by GPS-equipped cameras (including the iPhone 3G) to plot your photos on a map, so you can find images based on where they were taken. If you’re not into zooming and panning around the map to find your locations, a button in the toolbar lets you switch to List view, an iTunes-like browser where your photos are 
sorted by country, state, city, and then landmark.

If your camera doesn’t geotag your photos automatically, you can add the locations yourself by clicking the little i button in a photo’s lower-left corner to flip it over (if your digicam takes SD cards, you might also consider picking up an Eye-Fi Explore card, which automatically uploads your pics wirelessly to the photo site of your choice and adds geotags to each image). As you type a location, iPhoto gives you a list of preloaded cities and points of interest, or you can add a new location (even looking them up by street address) and drop a pin to mark it. And if you want to edit the landmark for a geotagged photo--iPhoto split our pictures into “Brooklyn Bridge” and “The Brooklyn Bridge,” for example--just click the same little i and make your corrections.

Two new buttons in the iPhoto ’09 toolbar let you upload images to Facebook (with support for Faces tags) and Flickr (with support for geotagging). Unfortunately, both are steps backward from third-party plug-ins that already exist. We vastly prefer the Facebook Uploader for iPhoto (free, developers.facebook.com/iphoto), a free plug-in for iPhoto ‘06 and ’08 that still works with iPhoto ‘09. That plug-in lets you upload photos to any of your existing Facebook photo albums or create a new one, and gives you a chance to add a caption or tag your friends before uploading.

While the built-in Facebook option in iPhoto ’09 carries your Faces tags over automatically, you can’t add captions (and it doesn’t grab your descriptions), and a new Facebook album is created with the same name as the Event or iPhoto album you’re uploading from. This is because iPhoto keeps a link between the two, so if your friend tags someone in the photo on Facebook, that identity is synced back to your image in iPhoto. If you move the photo to another Facebook album, the link breaks. One way to at least keep all your iPhoto-to-Facebook images in 
one Facebook album is to upload them from a “Facebook pics” album 
within iPhoto, but the plug-in is way more flexible.

The built-in Flickr uploading also lacks options available in existing third-party plug-ins for previous versions of iPhoto. Again, photos are added to a new set with the same name as the Event or album you’re uploading from, and the only thing you can specify is who’s allowed to view your photos. Location data is uploaded if you check a box in iPhoto > Preferences > Web. The album is kept synced between Flickr and iPhoto, but if you want to add captions, you’ve got to do it in Flickr. The Free Flickr eXporter iPhoto Plugin (free, www
.dustin.li) doesn’t support iPhoto ’09, but we got iP2F ($14.95, www.tagtraum.com) and FlickrExport (£12, connectedflow.com) both working with it even without “official” support.

Clicking the Slideshow button lets you choose from six templates (the edgy Shatter template impressed everyone at the keynote demo, and the Snapshot and Sliding Panels themes are cool too), tweak the music and settings, and easily export the finished show to iTunes, optimized for iPhone, iPod, Apple TV, your computer, or MobileMe--or just save it as a QuickTime file to your hard drive. This is a cinch and makes those “oh, let me show you some photos” moments a lot more lively.

The Adjust panel’s sliders are reordered; start from the top and work your way down.

Other improvements include the editing tools: You can adjust an image’s saturation without affecting the skin tones, and the new Definition slider adds more contrast to the midtones, which boosts detail. And the hardcover photo books (found in the Keepsakes button) now have a glossy laminated cover to show off your photos, and higher-quality binding and printing for the same price, and they’re still as easy as ever to put together.

Faces and Places are rad additions to iPhoto, but if you’re already attached to the third-party Flickr and Facebook uploaders, the new built-in versions are a huge disappointment. Still, we’re happy we upgraded.

iLife '09
COMPANY: Apple, Inc.
CONTACT: www.apple.com
PRICE: $79 (as part of iLife ’09)
REQUIREMENTS: 867MHz or faster G4, G5, or Intel processor; Mac OS 10.5.6 or later; 512MB RAM; 4GB disk space
Facial-recognition technology in Faces. Geotagging support in Places.
Built-in Facebook and Flickr uploaders don’t work as well as the third-party plug-ins from previous versions.