I’ve spent at least 2 minutes with iPhoto 09, and come to the following conclusion: it is fantastic.
After installing iLife 09 and booting up iPhoto (does anyone care about the other 3 apps? not I!), it began scanning all of my photos finding and sorting all of the people in my library.
Face recognition is easily the most awesome photo library feature ever. Managing hundreds and thousands of finally became manageable.
This looks like a killer feature. I use Adobe Lightroom, and I really, really hope they choose to add something like this. If flickr added it i’d be happy too, but I imagine it needs a bit of horsepower so client-side would probably make more sense. iPhoto was great for me until my library got > 50000 photos, or maybe I just need a more powerful machine 🙂
yeah I’m still a small timer with only 1400 photos 🙂 so iPhoto still works great. It does a fairly good job recognizing photos, but It still took me ~ 3 hours to get [mostly] everything tagged – I’ve still got 1 to 2 hundred left :/
All in all though, I’m way happy with the upgrade, and agree, I’m eager to see this tech move to more places like Flickr etc