iPhoto is a capable application for managing your home digital photo library. This version introduces face recognition and geotagging, which integrate it more tightly with iWeb, the website builder for me.com.

iPhoto's objective is simple: manage your digital photo's. iPhoto can import photo's from any digital camera, perhaps with the exception of the digital SLRs introduced today. It has simple photo editing tools, quite capable for the average user. Photo's can be sorted into "events" (or folders), and iPhoto is smart enough to split what seems to be different events when importing photos.

On the output side iPhoto has several nifty tools for producing printed product. There are templates for photo albums, scrapbooks, calendars, etc all of which work very well. It certainly beats trying to do something similar in Word or Powerpoint. Where available, iPhoto can also upload your photos to have a professionally printed album made for you. iPhoto also has shortcuts for sening pictures by email.

Geotagging (adding location information to a photo) works well but really needs iWeb to shine as a function, like travel maps. Face recognition ditto. Actual recognition accuracy is very poor, quite embarrassing really, although correcting mistakes is easy without lifting fingers from the keyboard. On the upside, iPhoto loads much faster (feels like 3x) than previous versions.

Is iPhoto for you? Not if you're a professional photographer with ten of thousands of images - iPhoto's features are too limiting. But it's great for the average home user, and the price (part of the iLife package) is unbeatable. That said, it is quite a tepid update from the previous version, and given that this app gets updates every year, you may want to skip this one.

iLife comes free with every new Mac. If you have "an older" Mac (pre 2008) you may well want to consider upgrading.