iPhoto app comes to Apple's mobile devices

— -- For years, Apple's iPhoto has been the go-to software for Mac owners looking to catalog photos and make simple edits to pictures.

Now iPhoto has come to Apple mobile devices, specifically the new iPad and iPad 2 and iPhone and iPod Touch models with a camera.

The app is $4.99, and it joins a host of photo apps for the iPhone and iPad, a category that is quite competitive and rich.

Instagram, which lets folks tweak their photos with different looks (sepia, black and white, etc.) is far and away the most popular, with 27 million users. Camera Awesome, a new app just released last week from the folks at photo-sharing site SmugMug, is the most advanced. It adds similar filters, but more of them, and has much faster response time for taking photos.

So now Apple has a mobile photo app, one that also will give you filters to tweak your photos and help with organization.

The edits are fun, but the organization tools are an essential addition for any iPad owner. For $4.99, it's a better buy than any morning cup of coffee, and will last you for years.

Before, all your photos and videos on the iPad ended up in the "Camera Roll" section. You couldn't organize them, or even delete batches at a time. I probably have 1,000 images on my iPad. I don't have time to delete them one by one, so I just leave them there.

With the app, now you can hit the flag key to save your favorites, and then use the "Journal" tab to put together a new category. In the edit tab, you create a new Journal and name it.

That means you can separate your Halloween shots from the ones you made at Thanksgiving.

You can also upload your new Journal as an online gallery to the Web — as long as you've taken the time to create a free iCloud account. (It's available to owners of iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches.)

Photo editing takes a new twist. The app has been designed for folks who enjoy using their fingers and swiping, instead of using a mouse. You can swipe across portions of a photo (say the sky) to selectively lighten or darken it, which you can't do with the computer version of iPhoto. You can also crop, make an image lighter or darker, fix red eye and add the same kind of effects found on apps like Instagram and Camera Awesome.

The new app requires updating your software to iOS 5.1. It's an easy addition that can be had by going to the General section of your mobile device and clicking on software update.