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.

After clicking Mom's face in the corkboard, iPhoto may show other pictures it thinks is your mother. Click once on the mug to confirm it is or twice to indicate otherwise. Only you can't substitute the correct name at that point.

Alas, mistaken identities are common. If a person is wearing a hat or sunglasses in one picture but discards them in another, the program might miss out on a potential match.

Siblings are sometimes difficult to discern. Age is another factor. Pictures of my daughter at age 4 or 5 were not necessarily matched up with pictures of her as a 1- or 2-year-old. Face recognition doesn't work with pets.

Some mistakes were egregious. IPhoto sometimes suggested matches among people of a different gender or skin color. And it tried to match a photo of actress Florence Henderson with one of my little girl.

Even with errors, face recognition provides a shortcut to tagging a bunch of images. And the program gets smarter as you confirm or reject more names.

•There are places I remember. As the name suggests, the Places feature in iPhoto lets you find all the pictures you took by the Brandenburg Gate, Grand Canyon or some other locale. If you shot pictures with an iPhone or another GPS-capable digital camera, location or "geotagging" information is automatically captured by iPhoto as pictures are imported. IPhoto can read embedded longitude and latitude data to recognize such landmarks as the Eiffel Tower. You can personalize a location by telling iPhoto that a place is Grandpa's house or your vacation home.

If you don't have a GPS camera — and most people don't at this stage — you'll have to manually enter location information. It's labor intensive. Fortunately, you don't have to do this for every picture. You can enter the location information for an entire Event.

Once iPhoto knows where your pictures were shot, you can search for them by typing a location name or clicking on a list of locations. But the neatest way to search for photos by place is to use the interactive Google map inside iPhoto. Pins mark any area on the map where pictures were shot. Click the pin to bring up those images.

You can draw on location data when preparing custom keepsake travel books to include maps that complement your pictures.

Apple also improved touch-up and editing tools in iPhoto for dealing with red-eye, highlights and shadows and more. And you can now easily publish pictures directly to Facebook and Flickr.

But it's mainly the Faces and Places features that stand out. Though these can improve, they make a solid photo-management program that much better.

E-mail: ebaig@usatoday.com