Apple's freshened iPhoto makes photo organizing a snap

— -- Faces. Places. In a nutshell, that's how Apple is polishing up the latest version of its iPhoto photo-management program. IPhoto promises to recognize the subjects in your photographs. And the locations where pictures were snapped.

These new tools are handy. But Faces comes with some blemishes.

IPhoto '09 shows up this week as part of Apple's iLife '09 software suite. It joins sweet new versions of iMovie and GarageBand and is rounded out more modestly by iDVD and iWeb. The programs come on new Macs or are sold at retail for $79.

The inclusion of iLife software is a major reason I have found Mac computers so appetizing.

Here's an iPhoto close-up:

•Face-off. In the previous version, iPhoto automatically grouped images into "Events," each with a day's collection of pictures unless you specified otherwise. So you could segregate pictures by a kid's birthday party or college reunion.

The new iPhoto goes well beyond that by letting you organize and search for pictures based on who is in them and where they were shot.

The Faces feature uses face detection and recognition technologies to locate actual mugs (the process is done in the background) and determine who the people are. The concept isn't new, though it's still in its infancy. Google's Picasa, among other programs, has some version of face recognition.

In the handsome Faces view, a single snapshot is shown on a corkboard for every person whose face you've identified. Double-click on a face to see all the underlying images — convenient when you're trying to find just the right image of your kid. Or roll your mouse over the snapshot representing a face to rapidly skim through the other images you have of that person. You can also create "Smart Albums" to easily find photos of family members. Good stuff.

You must assign a name tag the first time iPhoto turns up a certain face. Later, iPhoto will scan your library to find other faces in your collection it thinks match those you've tagged. Click a name button when a photo is selected, and iPhoto may ask of a face, "Is this Mom?" Click a checkmark to indicate yes, or an "x" to say it isn't and type in another name.