I was impressed with the speed of downloads (as long as you don’t work from a CD or DVD directly) and the way it stored downloads into events from each folder on the drive. The “fixes” offered are certainly basic and easy, but don’t go very far. The face recognition is actually fun to work with and the “accept” or “reject” actions are very quick and easy, as is the query to name an unknown face.

If an image is not sorted you click the Name button at the bottom of the screen and the program will query you about the face. If you have created a set for that individual just type their name into the query box and the image will be properly sorted. Typing just the first letter of the name will bring up the full name, and then just click OK.

Face recognition is a fascinating new aspect of organizing images, and I must admit that it helped me sort out images from eight years of disks very quickly. From there I was able to share to Flickr and Facebook if desired (I don’t), make a slide show, as well as get the images organized into a book, which is my main activity with family images these days.

For editing, sorting out people, creating projects, and uploading to various sharing sites it is an excellent program for Mac owners who have lots of family photos from over the years. As far as face recognition is concerned, it’s a fun first step and an exciting one as well that I am sure will be improved as time goes on. But I was able to sort out images of different family members from eight years of shots within about an hour. Now, even with some missed guesses on the program’s part, that is very impressive in my book. In fact, the program makes organizing images, always a bit of a pain, actually kind of fun.

There are some basic image adjustment features, including rotate, redeye, and some “special effects” that are one-click filters for vignetting, soft edges, sepia, black and white, etc. that do offer degrees of the effect. You can also have some control using the “Adjust” sliders for saturation, contrast, etc., as well as a neutral gray selector. You back out with the usual Mac Command/Z if you do not like the change.

Note: iLife ’09 for Mac requires Mac OS X 10.5.6 or later and includes iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, and iWeb. For more information and tutorials, visit www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials.

Once you begin to build face file sets the program can be made to query you when you select an image. It finds all the faces in the scene and asks you to do the ID, which it then sorts into the appropriate Faces folder. All Photos © 2009, George Schaub, All Rights Reserved.

Next: Places and Geotagging