Apple iLife '09 is a great application suite for simple media organising and editing, and the addition of features like face recognition, geotagging and music lessons makes it worth the update.
Apple's iLife '09 may be just an evolutionary upgrade from iLife '08, but oh what an evolution. iPhoto gets some major new features with face recognition, geotagging and social networking integration; iMovie sees a return of advanced features that went away with '08; GarageBand gets some major star power with music lessons from genuine recording artists; and iWeb makes it that much easier to design your own personal website. If you care about face recognition and basic music lessons at all, iLife '09 is a must-have upgrade. And for AU$129, or AU$169 for five licences, it's not a bad deal, plus it's free with a purchase of a new Mac.
System requirements are as follows: an Intel-based Mac, a Mac PowerPC G5 or a Mac PowerPC G4. Older Macs require at least a 2GHz processor. If you don't want either iMovie '09 or iMovie '08, you can still get iMovie HD (or the '06 version), and that one will be able to run on a slower machine. Our iLife '09 installation took around 15 minutes.
iPhoto '09
iPhoto has traditionally been the headliner in the iLife suite, and it's no different in the iLife '09 package. While iPhoto '08 introduced Events, which let you group photos based on the dates that they were taken, iPhoto '09 introduced three new features that got the Mac community buzzing: facial recognition, geotagging and social network support. For the facial recognition, you don't have to tag every single photo you have with a name and a face; the idea is that iPhoto '09 will be smart enough to do the facial recognition for you. But that happens only after you do the necessary legwork.
Faces
Assuming you don't have photos in your iPhoto library already, you'll have to import them. We had around 3,500 photos sitting in our Aperture library, so it took some time to transfer all the photos over. After you're done importing your photos, you can immediately start identifying faces and names. Sometimes iPhoto will be smart enough to detect faces for you and sometimes not. If it does detect a face for you, it'll display a square over what it thinks is a face, with a place-holder name "Unknown Face" underneath it. If it doesn't detect a face, you'll have to hit the "Add Missing Face" button on the bottom left, select the face and add a name. Once you identify a face with a name, you can go to the Faces corkboard, select a face and iPhoto '09 will scout out your entire library to find photos with a similar face. Then you select "Confirm Name" and it's up to you to go through the results to confirm or not confirm if the photos really do show that person. This is how the facial recognition training works.
The facial recognition is impressive, but it's by no means perfect. Detecting faces in the first place is the biggest hurdle. Not every photo is necessarily a perfect head-on style portrait, and iPhoto has trouble with such shots. What's weirder is that iPhoto often sees faces that aren't even there — any combination of shapes or shadows that sort of resemble a face gets picked up mistakenly. False positives are better than false negatives, but it can get a little tiresome in the beginning.
As for the actual face recognition itself, this will get better the more photos you have. For example, on our first attempt, almost every person who wore glasses was mistaken as the same person. Only when we started to really go through the photos, confirming and not confirming them, did the results get better. It's not ideal, but the facial recognition goes a long way in making photo organisation that much easier. It's definitely better than going through each photo one-by-one, so the Faces feature gets thumbs-up.
If you click the "i" button on the lower right hand of the photos on the Faces corkboard, you will see more information about that person, like the number of photos you have of him or her. There are also two optional fields, where you can enter the person's full name and email address. Since you can match a face with an email address, it would be nice if iPhoto could incorporate the Faces feature into Address Book for photo ID.
Places
The next big feature add-on in iPhoto '09 is Places, which lets you geotag your photos with a location. The feature is especially useful if you have a GPS-enabled camera or camera phone and can get a GPS signal, since iPhoto '09 will immediately detect the longitude and latitude of photos taken with those devices. Just note that if you're using the camera on the new iPhone 3G, you'll have to turn on location services in the phone's settings so the iPhone can detect the GPS information.
To start with Places, select the "i" icon at the bottom right of a photo for a pop-up information box. Click the "Enter photo location" field and select "New place" if this photo was taken at a place you've never recorded before. A map window will then pop up. If your camera is GPS-enabled, there'll already be a pin pointed at the photo's location. If you don't have a GPS device, you can enter in your location manually; just enter in something like "Disneyland, California" in the Google Search field, and Google will do the location work for you. Once you're satisfied that the pin is pointed at the right spot on the map, just select "Drop Pin" and name the place. Once finished, you can see a map with all of your photo pins.
Facebook and Flickr integration
Another major update to iPhoto '09 is the ability to upload your photos to Facebook, Flickr or MobileMe. You also can email them or add them to your iWeb folder for use on your iWeb's photo page or blog. For Facebook, if the names you assign to the faces are the same as your friend's Facebook ID, iPhoto will match them with that friend automatically once you upload them to your account. If a friend adds photo tags to the published photos on Facebook, the names will automatically sync to iPhoto as well.
As for the Flickr integration, you'll have to authorise the iPhoto Uploader on your Flickr account. From there, you can select the photo size you wish to upload (Web, Optimized, or Actual Size) and whether you want the photo to be viewed by anyone, only family and friends or just you. If you want, you can also upload an entire album at once. If you matched those photos with a particular location in Places, that photo will appear on your Flickr map.
Once you upload them, iPhoto automatically creates a Flickr photo set for you, and the title of the photo set is based on the photo's Event name. Also, any changes you make to the titles or descriptions in iPhoto will sync with Flickr and vice versa. Truth be told, we're a little annoyed that iPhoto creates a photo set every time we upload something to Flickr because we don't necessarily want that, especially if you're only uploading a single photo. (A whole photo set for one photo seems a bit silly.) What's more, there are no other Flickr settings in the iPhoto Uploader; you can't add the photos to non-iPhoto sets, add them to Flickr pools or add tags to your photos. This severely reduces the functionality of the Flickr integration in iPhoto '09. We would recommend using Flickr's own Flickr Uploader instead.
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I will primarely buy iLife '09 for the Places feature in iPhoto. I'm a geotagging fan and now there is a cool way to handle my geotagged photos. I'm using the iPhone app GeoLogTag for a while now to geotag my Flickr photos, but since it also exports GPX files, I can use it to geotag all my photos (in combination with HoudahGeo).
The good: Places in iPhoto '09