I have to say that I’m in utter amazement at the feature set demoed for iPhoto 09. The work that went into this product is evident, with a polished interface and solid goals.

Faces

iPhoto has been given facial recognition as a feature called “Faces”. iPhoto automatically recognizes people in your photos and gives you the chance to give the person a name. Then, iPhoto will suggest photos that the person appears in. As you continue to use iPhoto, essentially tagging all the people that appear, iPhoto just gets smarter and can even more accurately recognize faces. To make this feature useful, you can now view your photos by Faces, in addition to Events, to view all photos that a particular person appears in.

And here is the coolest part yet: Facebook integration with Faces. You can quickly and easily publish and album to Facebook, with the album appearing in the iPhoto source list. And the photos are automatically tagged for you. And, if someone tags himself in the photo, iPhoto is aware of it and will notify you, so you can add that information to your iPhoto library. Now that is integration and makes this Facebook photo junkie happy!

Geo tagging support is built in on several levels, easily using the information from your GPS enabled camera, such as the iPhone, to place your photos by locations. Don’t have a GPS camera? You can easily add the location to your photos within iPhoto, so you won’t be left out. Great for viewing all the photos taken in Paris, for example. Or how about when creating a physical photo book and having a map in there, complete with arrows for the trip you took. Very polished indeed.

Slideshows

The slideshows feature has been greatly improved, with support for some pretty cool themes and finally the ability to quickly share with iTunes to take on your iPod or iPhone and share with your friends. And slideshows even use face detection to make sure that it doesn’t crop people out when displaying the pictures. Now that’s impressive. Another nice step forward.

I have to say that I’ll be ordering my copy of iLife 09 simply for iPhoto. The face detection and Facebook integration is well worth the 80 bucks as far as I’m concerned. A truly great release!