With every year, your digital photo collection is likely to grow by hundreds of new photos. iPhoto '08 added a feature called Events that did its best to group photos by the event they were taken at.

This made it easier to find the photos you wanted when your collection got too unruly to browse by individual photo.

iPhoto '09 continues this idea of automation with Faces, its most highly touted new feature. Faces works by analysing your iPhoto library, a one-time process that can take several minutes to several hours depending on how vast your library is. It then presents you with the photos it thinks contains the same person as you previously identified in another photo.

Using Faces

In theory, Faces is a terrific timesaver that also enhances the photos you share with others. In practice, it involves more legwork than Apple's literature or demos would have you to believe.

Faces works best when subjects are well lit and looking directly at the camera: it won't work well with profiles and is less effective in low-light settings. It also struggles with siblings, presumably because the facial features the algorithm uses to determine likeness are the same ones we share with our family members. If anyone has ever told you that you look just like your brother or sister, Faces will happily remind you of that, again and again and again.

Almost acknowledging that it's not perfect, Faces will not automatically tag any other photos, instead prompting you to tell it on a per-photo basis if the person it thinks looks like Elizabeth is really her or not.

To be fair, accuracy improves somewhat as you tag more photos of the same person, and iPhoto '09 offers the best face-recognition that we have seen in any consumer product.

If you're a Facebook user, two treats await you in iPhoto '09: not only can you publish galleries to your account with a single click and specify who can see them, your Faces tags carry over, as well.

Facebook integration is also bidirectional, meaning if you mistakenly tag someone with the wrong name or don't tag them at all and a friend adds the correct name on Facebook, the changes will be reflected in iPhoto, as well.

Places

Further lending context to photos is the new Places feature, which allows you to assign geographic coordinates for where a particular photo was taken. This feature, commonly referred to as geotagging, is accomplished automatically if your camera features GPS, but odds are that it doesn't since so few on the market currently do. As that functionality expands across more models, so too will the usefulness of Places.

GPS is not required for Places, and you can enter the information manually. Accuracy will obviously be diminished with this approach since you will probably just be entering a city name and not specific coordinates, but you will still be able to see on a nice map where you captured your memories.

Places also allows you to create and order much-improved printed albums of your photos than before, complete with a high resolution map of your travels, for instance. You can also order hard cover photo books with matching dust jackets, in addition to the soft cover and wire bound books on offer.

More features

Other improvements to iPhoto '09 include new themed slideshows and an improved Ken Burns slideshow that leverages the new face recognition technology to ensure no one's head gets cut off as the slideshow pans and zooms. You can also export slideshows to iTunes to view on your iPod, iPhone or Apple TV.

Finally, iPhoto's editing tools continue to improve: Auto Red-Eye works with a single click, skin tones can be excluded when adjusting a photo's saturation, and a new definition tool adjusts local contrast, so you can improve the background without blowing out the foreground, for example.