Hands on with iPhoto 09

So, with so little hardware news (if a 17" laptop can be considered "little"), the Apple booth was all about iLife and iWork.

I spent some quality time with iPhoto 09, alone and talking with an Apple staffer (who was a photo geek too), and here are my impressions.
For me, the main new feature is the integrated geotagging of pictures. Simply clicking on places in the source list shows a map displaying the world with pins indicating where you shot your pictures (in a very iPhone-ish style).

The feature uses Google Maps, and is really fast. There is a new "terrain" display mode that replaces the usual "map": it shows a topographic map including elevation, which looks absolutely gorgeous.
Clicking on a pin's arrow display images shot in this location.

Images can be geotagged directly if your images contain EXIF location data, or manually by using Google Maps, like you can do on flickr.com. To location data to a bunch of images, simply look for a "place" by typing in the search field, then simply drop a pin on the map.

A cool feature is that you can define a "size" for the place you select, which is basically a circle around the pin, for which you can change the radius, meaning that you can have an "area" instead of just a point (like "my district" rather than a couple of GPS coordinates).

Once you have selected a place, you can associate it to selected pictures, or bookmark it for future use (this is neat).
When a picture has been geotagged, you can view location details by simply clicking on it.

I asked an Apple staffer about the geo features of iPhoto, and after a long discussion slipped the $1,000,000 question: will these features make it under some form in Aperture. The answer was: "I can't say anything, except that the iPhoto software manager is also the Aperture manager, so... I'm really looking forward to it." Thats would be awesome (and please throw in GPS track log import).

The other "big" (although a tad unnecessary) new feature is the face detection tool. Basically, you select an image, ask iPhoto to detect the face, which it then displays within a frame (quite accurately), and you are asked to name the person.

Once this is done, you can search your library by people, and iPhoto will try and find all the pictures that contain a face similar to the one you defined for that person. It sort of works, pretty well for frontal shots of adults, quite randomly for action shots of kids.

Overall, this feels like an interesting feature, especially for family shots, but we'lll have to see how it handles real photos, and not selected demo shots.
Another new feature is the publishing of pictures directly form iPhoto to your flickr or facebook account, which works as it should, although you can only use one account at a time (too bad for people posting to flickr using multiple accounts, like a personal and a pro one).
Overall, this feels like a solid update to iPhoto, especially the geotagging features.