Apple kicked off 2009 with a bang today, introducing iLife 09 to fans at Macworld in San Francisco. The cream of the crop is the new version of iPhoto, packing some seriously slick technology including face detection, geotagging, Flickr and Facebook integration.
Phil Schiller might’ve had some big shoes to fill as he took Steve Jobs’ place at the Macworld keynote this morning, but he did it with style, ripping the covers off iLife 09, Apple’s updated suite of lifestyle apps.
The most astounding updates come in iPhoto, which now supports facial recognition and geotagging. It’ll let users filter photos by the people featured in them, or by the location they were taken.
iPhoto is able to recognise faces automatically, meaning it can organise a hefty library of images in minutes. Similarly, it recognises location data embedded in photos from GPS-equipped cameras and cameraphones… like the iPhone. But instead of dishing up dry latitude and longitude information, iPhoto recognises the place and gives a more human name, e.g. an address, street or landmark name, like “Eiffel Tower, Paris.”
Clever stuff. But it doesn’t stop there. Apple has finally added integration with Facebook and Flickr to iPhoto, so uploading pictures to the web takes just a couple of clicks.
There are new slideshow features too, that use face recognition to keep the subjects in frame through transitions and animations.
Out late January | $79 (or free with new Macs) | Apple
