I have been using iPhoto 09 for about a day. I am happy with the three major improvements that Apple made: Faces, Places and Improved Editing. However, as usual, Apple dropped the ball on a couple of things.

First, with Faces, it is too difficult to got through my thousands of photos and find and check the photos for the face recognition. I cannot find a way to sort the photos in a smart album by unidentified faces. If that was available, then one could easily add the appropriate name. Also, I cannot find a way to add a name to a face that is misidentified when confirming names. It could be a learning curve issue, but it would have been good to get those features.

As for places, it works great if you have the GPS coordinates in the photo’s EXIF data BEFORE you import it into iPhoto. However, if you did not have the GPS coordinates in the EXIF data, it is a bearish manual process to add them with iPhoto. Also, if you use a tool like Geotagger or HoudahGEO to modify the EXIF data within the iPhone Library, there is no way to tell iPhoto to update its database. Finally, any input into the iPhone database of GPS information is not inserted into the underlying files EXIF data within the library.

All this technical mumbo-jumbo aside...please make sure you have the GPS coordinates in the photo’s EXIF data before you import it into Photo. So, in short, the new Faces and Places feature is great going forward, but Apple dropped the ball on utilities to make it easy to migrate your existing photos within the iPhone library.

Tags: IPhoto, Apple, Photography