Alright, I’ve had a chance to put Apple’s new iLife ’05 digital lifestyle suite through its paces. Wow. We’ll spend the next few weeks covering the many improvements in the integrated best-of-breed applications that manage digital photos, movies, music, and DVD creation. One word of caution, though. iLife ’05 only runs on Macintosh computers. There’s nothing out there in the PC world, among all that software, that can equal the collective power of the iLife suite. Why settle for second best? But, I digress.

This week we’re talking iPhoto. After you get that digital camera and start shooting, you’ll find you need to import, organize, edit, and share your digital masterpieces. iPhoto handles all these tasks with aplomb and style. Let’s cover each task in detail.

Importing and organizing. Many of the new generation of SLR digital cameras can capture images in RAW format, which provides higher resolution (and file size) and greater editing flexibility. iPhoto can handle RAW, as well as Photoshop, files. Whether you connect your camera to the computer via a USB cable or remove the memory card and use a USB card reader, iPhoto automatically opens to receive the photo files. All photo management applications do this. However, iPhoto ’05 allows you to add descriptive metadata to all the images as they are imported. You’ll remember that metadata is information embedded in the image file such as the date and time you took the photo, the camera settings used, etc. iPhoto can add a description of your choosing, like “Beach” or “Family”, as the file is imported, so you don’t have to go back and add keywords and comments later.

Plus, iPhoto ’05 adds a search window that uses the same fast search technology used in iTunes to almost instantly find photos by keyword or comments. With iPhoto’s “Smart Albums” feature, you can create an album whose contents are automatically updated with every new “Beach” or “Family” photo you take. Or, create a Smart Folder that contains, say, every photo taken in the last month, and burn those photos onto a CD every month to back up your precious photo library. Cool stuff.

Need to quickly find all the photos in your Library that were taken in January, 2003? iPhoto ’05 adds a calendar. If there are photos in iPhoto taken during a month, or on a specific day, that month or day are highlighted in the calendar. Click on the month or day, and thumbnails of the images appear in the main window.

Editing. Earlier versions of iPhoto offered fairly basic editing: cropping, red-eye removal, blemish removal, and a one-click generic image-improvement button. More experienced digital photographers needed more tools, so they would use an application like Photoshop Elements to adjust image exposure. iPhoto ’05 now includes a floating palette of pro-level tools called the Advanced Editing Dashboard. The Dashboard includes a Straighten tool, with which you can level your photos. Still want to use a more advanced editing application like Photoshop? You can easily set up iPhoto to automatically open Photoshop or another application to do your editing, and the changes are saved back into iPhoto. More cool stuff.

What if you don’t like what you did to the photo? No problem. When you make any changes to an image within iPhoto, iPhoto performs the changes on a copy of the image. The original is safely stored in your iPhoto Library folder. Simply click on “Revert to Original”, and your photo’s back to the way it came out of the camera.

More next week on the real beauty of iPhoto: sharing your photos with family and friends.

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski