Apple's photo manager goes big

The new iPhoto ’11 looks amazing—and that’s a great thing for software that helps you get the most out of your photos. But it’s more than just a pretty face, letting you actually do some pretty amazing things with all those pixels. Apple built in major enhancements to the full-screen mode, slideshow templates, and online sharing tools. But iPhoto isn’t just about zeroes and ones—’11 boasts improved book-design tools and a new letterpress-card feature for those extra-special anniversaries and events, making it that much easier and more satisfying to bridge the gap between the digital and physical worlds.

On the digital side, while the full-screen mode in the prior version was pretty basic, iPhoto ’11 lets you browse Events, Albums, Faces, Places, and Projects in this mode. It looks great, sure, but it also gives you that much more room to work with every pixel of your Mac’s display. There’s more than a hint of the iPad’s secret sauce in this new display mode, too. Albums now get full-size icons, just like events, so they’re no longer a nondescript set of titles in the source list. And you can skim albums just like you can events and choose your own key photo, which shows up as the album thumbnail.

While full-screen mode looks terrific, the navigation system is different from what you’re used to—and not always in a good way. The bottom of the screen holds five buttons for Events, Faces, Places, Albums, and Projects. Double-clicking an album name shows you its contents, and another double-click on a photo blows it up to full size. Backing out again requires clicking buttons at the top left of the screen. As a navigation system, it would be fine on a device based around a touchscreen interface, but on a Mac, it feels limited. It’s like iPhoto now has two separate, parallel navigation systems. For all its full-screen flash, some users will prefer using the standard view after all, especially for large-scale photo organization tasks.

The full-screen mode brings iPad/iPhone simplicity to the iPhoto interface. The editing tools have been reorganized into three panes on the right, too, which cuts the clutter. Note the quick photo adjustment buttons at the top of the Effects panel.

There’s no doubt about the effectiveness of the new photo-emailing feature, however. With email baked into iPhoto ’11, there’s no need to export photos to your email client. And eight great-looking mail templates can accommodate up to 10 images. The photos you select are laid out automatically, so there’s nothing you need to do except type in a title and message and choose a recipient. iPhoto uses your existing Address Book contacts and the email accounts you’ve set up in Apple Mail, so there’s no tedious setup process to go through, and everything just works. What’s particularly clever is that you can attach your photos at their original resolution or have iPhoto automatically optimize the message size to a maximum of 5MB to make sure it’s not rejected by mail servers with size limits.

iPhoto ’09 already supported Facebook uploads for online sharing, but iPhoto ’11 brings much better integration and synchronization. Once you’ve created your Facebook account in the preferences, iPhoto automatically downloads any existing Facebook albums, and from then on, any new ones you create are merged seamlessly with those you’ve already got. iPhoto ’11 uploads profile pics too and zaps single pictures straight to your Facebook Wall. iPhoto will synchronize your Faces data with tags in Facebook, and now any photo comments made by your Facebook friends show up in iPhoto’s Info panel.

If you’re more physical-book than Facebook, Photo Books make great gifts and keepsakes, and you’ll discover big improvements here. The new theme browser uses your own photos to preview your book, provides the ability to design double-page spreads, and adds a book layout mode that shows all your pages at once. The Autofill option has been enhanced so that it gives priority to the highest-rated pictures and uses face detection when cropping photos to make sure that people aren’t cropped out or chopped in half at the edges. The letterpress cards are a new addition, using special printing techniques to deboss the surface design and then digitally print your card. The books and cards look fantastic, and while most of us might balk at paying money to share our pictures when we’ve gotten used to sharing them for nothing online, the physical quality and feel of a professionally printed photo book is hard to beat.

The bottom line. iPhoto ’11 looks great, but the core organizing and editing tools have scarcely changed at all. It’s all about the souped-up user interface and the new, exciting, and easier ways to share your photos.