Apple on iPhoto ’09 changes

When Apple sat down to tackle an update for iPhoto, it knew what features it wanted to tackle—the ones that other image editors and organizers had failed to master.le

“What we’ve seen with Face Detection and Geotagging so far is that they haven’t been useful,” Rob Schoeben, Apple’s vice president of applications product marketing told me in a post-keynote briefing at Macworld Expo. “If you’re not a pro, photo tagging has failed, but with iPhoto it’s really a lot of fun.”

Schoeben’s comments give us some insight into how Apple approaches software updates, particularly for a feature-rich program that made its debut seven years ago. When a product has been around for that long, it’s hard to come up with new features that actually advance the program’s capabilities, as opposed to loading it down with superfluous features.