OK so this year’s MacWorld wasn’t exactly thrilling but for snappers there was some good news with the announcement of iLife 09.

While this includes upgrades to GarageBand and iMovie, for photographers, the big news is the upgrade of iPhoto.

The key addition is the ability to organise, browse and search images not only by when they were shot (Events), but by who appears in them
(Faces) and where they were taken (Places).

Says Apple: ‘iPhoto automatically scans
photos to detect people’s faces and when you assign a name to any face
iPhoto will automatically find more pictures of that person. The
library can be searched by name or browsed using the new Faces View.

‘Places automatically imports photo location data from a GPS-enabled
camera or any iPhone or you can manually assign a location to any
photo, group of photos or event. Once iPhoto knows where photos were
taken, you can easily explore them with a simple search or an
interactive map.’

The new version of the software is also claimed to make it easier for photographers to put their images up on Facebook or Flickr and, as a nice added extra, snaps published to Facebook include assigned names, and
name tags added on Facebook sync back to iPhoto.

Photographers can also share
photos by creating a themed slideshow to play on your Mac, iPhone or
iPod, or create a travel book, complete with customised maps
of your journey.

iLife ’09 will be available this month for $79 through the Apple Store but remember it’s for Macs only.