This is the first in a series of articles reviewing iLife ‘08, the latest version of Apple’s multimedia suite. This series will have five parts: iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, and iWeb. iTunes, however, will not be discussed in this review since it did not receive an update and it is ubiquitous. The score you see in this page is for iPhoto only, not for the iLife suite as a whole.

Those of you looking for part 2 of my iWork Review (Keynote) should get it this weekend. The Numbers review should follow around the middle of next week.

iPhoto 7’s source list.

On the surface, it would seem that iPhoto hasn’t changed much between iLife ‘06 (iPhoto 6) and iLife ‘08 (iPhoto 7). After all, the basic user interface is largely unchanged, and it still works like iPhoto has in the past. However, iPhoto 7 includes a good number of enhancements to make this an update that should please most iPhoto enthusiasts.

iPhoto’s overall user interface model remains unchanged, but it has received a number of minor tweaks and updates. Let’s start simple, shall we?

Finding the photos you want more easily seems to be the central idea behind many of the changes and additions in iPhoto 7. Most of the updates aren’t focused on new projects, but instead on new organization tools. First of all, there’s the sidebar that received an iTunes 7-like makeover. There now exists several categories for all your stuff: Library, Recent (which include the most recent albums or events you viewed, as well as the last photo import, among other things), Albums (including Smart Albums), Web Galleries (for you .mac subscribers out there), Projects (books, calendars, cards), and Slideshows. Like in iTunes, there is no way to turn the categorized sidebar view off. I personally like the categorized view, since it makes it even easier to figure out what you’re looking at at a glance. There is one little thing that puzzles me, however. Why on Earth are the Flagged photos group and Trash under the “Recent” category? I guess they couldn’t think of any better place to stick them?

Searching by date.

iPhoto’s search capabilities have been enhanced a great deal. Now you can search on text/keyword, date, and rating. The search-by-date functionality has been present since iPhoto 5, but the user interface was completely different in prior versions. Previously, a sliding pane in the lower left corner of the window with an iCal-like mini-calendar was the preferred method for finding photos by date. Now this functionality has been rolled into the search field. Either enter a date or date range into the search field or simply click on the search field to bring up the mini-calendar, which works much as it did in prior iPhoto versions. Searching by star rating adds five “studs” into the search field. Stars get added from left to right, so if you want to search for photos with a one-star rating and above, click the left-most stud. For two stars and above, click the second star from the left, and so on.

A flagged photo.

Additionally, iPhoto now grants users the ability to flag photos. It works just as you would expect: to flag a photo, select the photo and click the “Flag” button. A small flag icon shows up in the corner of the photo and it will be added to the “Flagged” group under the Recent category. This feature is useful, for example, when deciding which photos to order prints for. iPhoto’s has a similar feature from the beginning--a “checkmark” keyword--but it’s been tucked away since version 2. Photo flagging brings this useful feature back to the foreground.

Speaking of Keywords, Apple has brought some welcome enhancements to this feature as well. The Keywords palette has received a facelift in iPhoto 7, and one new feature that seems to have been forgotten in the demos: the ability to pick favorite keywords and assign keyboard shortcuts to them. The Keywords palette is divided into two sections: “Keywords,” which lists the general keywords you have created, and “Quick Group,” which lists your favorite keywords and the keyboard shortcut assigned to them. Adding or modifying a keyword is simple too: click the “Edit keywords” button in the lower left corner of the palette. This will pull up a list of all the keywords with the associated keyboard shortcut, and buttons allowing you to add, delete, or rename keywords, or to assign a shortcut. The addition of keyboard shortcuts is welcome and may lead some people to actually use the feature. Maybe. However, the Keywords palette is still too hidden for most people to bother with it. Additionally, iPhoto’s keywords feature does not support Flickr-style tagging, which is unfortunate.

An Event icon. And what an event it was!

The biggest organization additions to iPhoto 7 are events, which replace “rolls” from earlier versions of iPhoto. The concept is similar to rolls, but instead of the paradigm being centered around photo imports, it centers around, well, events. By default, iPhoto will create one event for each day of photos taken, though you do have the option of grouping photos in week-long events or leaving two- or eight-hour gaps in between events. iPhoto isn’t exactly flexible on the automatic creation events, but splitting and merging existing events is very easy. To merge two events, simply drag one (or more) into another event. Boom, the events merge. To split an event, double-click an event, select the photos you want to split off, and click the Split button. Piece of cake.

Viewing the contents of an event is very easy thanks to a clever idea from Apple. Thanks to a new feature called Skimming simply move the mouse across the event icon to quickly see which photos are contained in each event,. Photos from the event will appear in the event icon. The best way I can think of to describe the idea is to imagine your life flashing before your eyes. Skimming is a great addition to iPhoto, and I’m surprised that nobody thought of it before.

As slick as events are, there are a few pitfalls. Firstly, every item in your iPhoto library must be assigned to an event. Apparently Apple forgot that most people don’t just take photos on events. This fact made working with Events frustrating for me initially, because I thought that I could use Events for individual occasions, and then I would use albums for more general topics like “dogs” or “kids.” A workaround is to create an Event for photos not tied to any particular event. I call mine “Uneventful.” Additionally, there is no way to turn off Events. Despite the pitfalls, Events is still a welcome addition to iPhoto.

Okay, you’ve organized your photos. What about sharing? In the past iPhoto has had integration with .mac in the form of photo albums (web pages populated with thumbnails of your images). Later, iWeb took over the online photo album tasks. .Mac integration is tighter than ever with the addition of .mac Galleries. .Mac Galleries are photo galleries generated by iPhoto and utilize AJAX and other Web 2.0 technologies. The galleries themselves are visually stunning and elegant, if a bit slow to load on some connections. I have yet to look at the code output, however. The best part, though, is that posting photos to .mac is no longer a one-way activity, as you can allow others to post their photos to your gallery as well (think Flickr). Combined with .mac Galleries and 10 GB of storage, .mac is finally looking like it may be worth the annual $99 fee. But I digress.

A notable omission from iPhoto 7 is Photocasting. I can only speak for myself, but I only used it once, and that was to demonstrate it for my last iPhoto review. I guess you can now call Photocasting a miserable failure? The ability to subscribe to a Photocast--now called a photo feed--remains, however.

See a sample .mac gallery.

iPhoto’s new Adjustments panel.

iPhoto’s editing tools have seen a number of welcome enhancements. Let’s start with the adjustments panel. Your good friends like Tint, Saturation, and Exposure are still there (as are functions outside the Adjust panel, such as red-eye removal, the retouch brush, and the one-click Enhance function), but these old-timers have been joined by new additions like noise reduction, which reduces graininess in your photos. Completely replacing the nearly useless brightness and contrast controls--I ruined more photos thanks to these two tools--are the far more useful Highlights and Shadows brightness levels sliders. Moving the Highlights slider to the right dims the brighter portions of the photographs, making them appear less washed-out. Doing the same with the Shadows slider will brighten the dark portions of a photo. The results are miles ahead of what one would have gotten with the old tools.

Additionally, iPhoto’s adjustments panel now features white point correction, designed to remove color casts in photographs. Simply click the white point adjustment button (signified by an eyedropper), click on a neutral white or gray point in the photo, and iPhoto does the rest. The results are generally pretty good, especially on indoor shots. Last but not least, you can now apply the adjustments made to one photo to other photos by clicking the adjustments panel’s “Copy” button to copy the settings applied to one photo, choosing the other photo you want to apply the adjustments to, and clicking the adjustments panel’s “Paste” button. This greatly simplifies fixing, say, a group of photos taken in similar lighting conditions that all have similar problems. Thank you, Apple!

Last but not least, iPhoto adds more flexibility to the Retouch brush and red-eye correction. You can now control the size of the Retouch brush and the area which the red eye filter is applied to. No longer do you have to skip on red-eye correction when the red-eye tool ends up correcting surrounding skin areas as well. If you don’t upgrade to iPhoto 7 for the new organization tools, upgrade for the new editing tools. It won’t take Aperture’s place, but users who fit somewhere between basic iPhoto users and Aperture users will definitely appreciate the new tools.

iPhoto’s photo importing has finally received some much-needed improvements. That’s right, you can now pick and choose which photos to download from the camera and which to leave. Every other photo tool in the world has this ability it seems; it’s about time Apple caught up. Additionally, you can now hide photos on your camera that have already been imported so you don’t end up downloading the same photo more than once. Yay.

There are a few other observations I made. First of all, the interface is more responsive, partially due to the addition of a quicker preview mode. You can now double-click on a photo to open up a quick preview of the photo. It is basically like the Edit mode minus the editing toolbars, except it opens more quickly and gives the photo some more screen space. I haven’t done any scientific testing, but the user interface as a whole fees snappier compared to earlier versions of iPhoto. Secondly, the user interface seems to have taken some cues from the iPhone. Take a look at this screenshot, and note the bar at the top:

Compare to screenshots of the iPhone UI.

The same bar is very common in the iPhone user interface. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by the feature crossover, especially considering the iPhone-esque bar makes complete sense in such a context (this is a screenshot of what iPhoto looks like after double-clicking an event icon). Lastly, I’ve run across a couple of bugs. At one point iPhoto refused to quit in a timely manner. On another occasion, the .mac gallery feature wouldn’t work (relaunching corrected this problem) And I have yet to get the Export function to work. This may be due to plugins designed for iPhoto 6 that I have installed. I haven’t yet had the chance to confirm that this is what’s going on (it’s 2 AM and I’m on deadline), but as soon as I confirm what is causing this problem I will let you know. Lastly, the iPHoto library is now one self-contained package as opposed to the folder-based structure of earlier iPhoto libraries. Concern has been raised around the Blogosphere about how this will impact incremental backups.

All in all, I love the new iPhoto. Events proved to be frustrating initially until I figured out a way to manage it that fits the way I work better. Unlike iMovie (the subject my next iLife review part), iPhoto is a lot like the old iPhoto, only even better. I highly recommend it.