iPhoto 08 Quick Review

Apple announced the new iLife suite at a special announcement on Tuesday morning among enhancements to .Mac, some new iMacs and iWork 08 which includes a new spreadsheet program. We got our hands on a lot of those goodies and will put up reviews of all of them but for now attack iPhoto 08.

iLife 08 comes on a DVD and the installation is as easy as always. Plop in the DVD, click on the icon and away we go. It does change the icons in the dock and added iMovie in there which wasn't there before. When we start up iPhoto 08 it first told us it didn't like our keyword program, Keyword Manager and said it wouldn't work with this version. Next it said it needed to convert the photos to the new version which basically meant going through our 22,000 photos and putting them into events. We waited and it worked away.

Events

The biggest feature of the new iPhoto is the creation of events. Events are basically collections of photos which are based on time and are easier to manage than folders. We could call this "Film Rolls 2.0" but that would be taking away from the marketing blitz. iPhoto groups photos into logical events by the time they were taken. It looks like a lot of photos taken within a specific time period like an hour or so becomes and event. You can merge and split up events and view them by the cover icon. The idea is that most people put things into events as folders and this just makes it easier. We agree.

iPhoto decided that our 22,000 photos fit into about 100 events and for the most part got it right. A few things like wedding photos were broken up by since you can just drag one or more events onto another event to merge, it was easy to clean up. Overall the events do create a much better way of managing your photos and we can see doing away with our hundreds of photos.

Keywords, Tagging & Searching

One of our least favorite features of that last version of iPhoto was the inability to easily tag and title photos. There was no way to just jump from photo to photo and give them tags or titles. We are very happy to report that has been fixed. The keyword (tagging) feature and titles can now be tabbed in and out of so you can start with one photo and without leaving the keyboard go through a whole roll or event. The keywords show up in the Apple bubble (like email addresses in Mail) which is a nice touch. The keyword window pane is still a pain as it just shows an unorganized list and doesn't integrate into Address Book like Keyword Manager which we hope gets an update soon.

The searching function is improved as you can now search by date or event or keyword and the results are by event. Again, this is not as good as Keyword Manager's ability to just click a keyword or two and get back all of the photos tagged, but it is an improvement.

Web Gallery

For all you .Mac freaks out there like us the new Web Gallery feature is going to make you weep with happiness. While publishing to .Mac used to require an export and some fiddling on the website, Web Gallery now makes is super easy.

To create a Web Gallery you just select the photos you want and click the icon. It immediately puts them into a gallery listed in the left navigation and asks what preferences for the gallery. You can choose under what protection to put the gallery as well as if others can upload or email to the gallery. After that iPhoto just starts uploading the photos to .Mac adding a "pending" to each photo before it goes. If you rename the gallery or title the photos those changes are reflected in the online gallery which is the best feature. Other users can upload to the gallery using an online form or through email which also downloads to your iPhoto.

The gallery itself is a marvel of Web 2.0 technologies. There are new ways of browsing the photos with the two great features to download one or all of the photos for those family members who want to print things out.

iPhone Integration

There are just a few little things that make the new iPhoto and iPhone work well together. The first is since web galleries allow for email submissions you can easily take photos on your iPhone and email them in. The second is the iPhone now has a feature in the photo view to send to web gallery. The last and probably least impressive is all web galleries have an iPhone view which makes it easy to view and navigate.

Conclusion

We only got a few hours to play around with iPhoto and never dove too deep into the editing features but overall this release is a great one and is worth the price of admission for it alone. If you tag things and use the .Mac feature this is a great update.

• Events grouping
• Web Gallery synching
• Keyword and Titles

• Breaks some plugins
• Hides the calendar search

Apple iLife '08 at Amazon.com

Apple iLife '08 Family Pack at Amazon.com