Advertisement

iPhoto '08



We know that not everyone is as obsessed about Apple news as we are, so we're going be going through each updated app in iWork '08 and iLife '08 to highlight some of the big ticket new features. We're already done this for iWeb and Garageband, and now it is iPhoto in the spotlight (haha, get it?). Here we go:

Events

Events is the feature that his Steveness spent the most time on during his presentation. The idea is that since you

are usually taking pictures at an event, iPhoto should be smart enough to group them together for you, which has the side benefit of allowing you to browse your photos that much faster. Each Event (notice the capital E) has one picture that represents it, which you can choose. These Events, in turn, make up a new iPhoto view that shows you each Event (as seen above). When you hover the Event you can 'skim' through the photos to see the individual photos that much up that Event. You can also split up the generated Events, in case iPhoto doesn't group the photos correctly

Searching

I don't know about you, but I have given up on organizing my digital files. Search is my crutch, and luckily search is much improved in iPhoto '08. iPhoto 6's search is capable, but it just gives you one way to look at the results. New in iPhoto is highly organized search results, as seen to the right. This is going to save me lots of time.


Web Galleries


iPhoto has long been able to publish web albums, but now Apple has really beefed up this offer. Combine iPhoto '08 with a .Mac subscription (still going for $99) and you get .Mac Web Galleries. They offer up a slick, Web 2.0 interface for both your photos and videos. You can email pictures to a special email address and have those pics added, and synced to your copy of iPhoto (think camera pictures from the iPhone). You can, of course, decide who can add pictures to your galleries.

Other Stuff

Photo editing has been beefed up. You can now applied edits to one photo, copy them, and then paste them onto a number of other photos. The new Shadow and Highlight controls let you lighten shadows, or highlight something without impacting the overall brightness of the photo. Printing from iPhoto has been spruced up with a number of new templates to choose from, and ordering photo books, calendars, and cards is just as easier but the results are of higher quality.