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Apple iLife 09
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An impressive upgrade for users of iPhoto, iMovie and Garageband
Apple says that iPhoto is the flagship of its iLife suite, and it certainly gets a lot of attention in this latest upgrade. The iMovie video editor and Garageband music software get some welcome new features too.
The two big additions to iPhoto are 'Faces' and 'Places', which allow you to organise your photos using face recognition technology, or by linking photos to a specific location.
When you import a photo into iPhoto it scans the image to see if it can identify any of the faces featured. You can click the 'Name' button in the toolbar to add a name to a face. Once you've done this, iPhoto scans your photo library to see if it can recognise that person's face in other photos and gathers all the pictures of them under the 'Faces' heading in the Library panel on the left of the screen. Clicking on 'Faces' shows you all the people iPhoto has recognised, so you can quickly locate photos of individual people.
The face recognition works well, identifying a large number of photos in our library after we had labelled just a handful. It has limitations though, the main one being that it needs a good frontal view of a person's face to identify them accurately. Profile shots are hard to identify, so you may have to label these yourself.
Alternatively, you can use the 'Places' option to organise photos by location. If you've got a
GPS-equipped camera then iPhoto can use the location data from the camera, or you can simply enter the location information yourself. The program can then create a map of the world that allows you to click on any location in order to view the photos you took there. We'd still recommend buying Photoshop Elements for editing work, but iPhoto certainly makes it easy to organise large collections of photos so that you can quickly find the photos you want.
Many people will be more interested in the new version of iMovie. The last version wasn't an upgrade, it was a complete rewrite that managed to simplify certain editing features while throwing out a lot of features that people had come to take for granted. Thankfully, iMovie 09 restores a few of these. There's a new 'precision editor' that works more like the traditional timeline found in most video-editing programs, and new options for quickly combining clips, extracting the audio from one clip to use in another, and creating picture-in-picture effects. There's also a powerful new image stabilisation option that can eliminate the shaky movement of handheld camcorders, or footage that was shot on the move.
The other program that gets impressive new features is Garageband, Apple's easy-to-use music software. As well as some tidy new guitar amps and effects, Garageband 09 includes a series of tutorials that can help beginners learn to play keyboards or guitar. Another good feature for budding musicians is the 'jam' option that lets you practise by playing along to some ready-made tracks.
It's a shame iDVD and iWeb don't get much of an upgrade, but iPhoto, iMovie and Garageband certainly provide good value for money. Our only complaint is that the documentation is poor. Newcomers would benefit from a proper manual and tutorials rather than the motley collection of online Help files currently included with each program. Even so, iLife 09 is an impressive upgrade that is worth the money if you use any of the programs in the suite on a regular basis.Cliff Joseph
Verdict
Pros Very good upgrades for iPhoto, iMovie and Garageband
Cons iDVD and iWeb are rather overlooked
Overall An impressive upgrade that combines powerful new features with Apple's traditional ease of use
