Apple wasn't content just to introduce the astounding new iPad Air, cylindrical Mac Pro, and OS X Mavericks on the same day, but the tech titan also released new versions of its home media and office software, too—for both iOS and Mac OS. That's 12 updated apps in addition to all the big stuff the company announced in San Francisco. The Mac version of iPhoto has not only been updated to support Mavericks (which it requires to run) with full 64-bit performance and iOS 7 features, but also adds new possibilities for sharing, printing, and new maps to locate your photos.
A lot of what's good about iPhoto remains the same—an excellent full-screen mode, tight integration with Facebook and Flickr, and excellent output options such as cards and books. The software comes with all new Macs, and as part of the bargain-priced $49 iLife suite, or is available standalone for $14.99 from the Mac App Store. Though Picasa is free, it can't match iPhoto in interface design and support for online services. Those looking for even more photo-editing power might consider moving up to Adobe Photoshop Elements or even Lightroom. I tested the new iPhoto on a 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display and a 2.3GHz Core i7 CPU running OS X 10.9 Mavericks.
What's New in iPhoto?
Maps. iPhoto's new maps look beautiful, and allow for fluid pinch and unpinch zooming on a trackpad. GPS-tagged photos appear on the spot they were shot in the map with pushpins, that, as you zoom in, separate into multiple pushpins. Clicking on one of the pushpins opens a gallery view of the photos shot at the map location. I only wish that smaller thumbnail views of the photos on the map would appear right on the map, as they do in Photoshop Elements.
If a photo doesn't have GPS data, you'll have to assign a location in its Info panel—there's no ability to drag its thumbnail onto the main map. But the search bar in the Info panel map makes finding locations easy, and I do like how a mini map of the photo's location appears in the Info panel.
iCloud Features. iPhoto already supported the most important iCloud photo feature—Photo Stream. In fact, unlike on a Windows PC, where you can just see your iCloud Photo Stream photos in a regular desktop folder, on the Mac you're required to use either iPhoto or Aperture to see your iCloud Photos. With this update, iPhoto adds support for another Photo Stream feature—Photo Sharing, which is simply a folder where multiple users can upload and view photos. Normally Photo Stream is just a personal backup and access to your own photos.
The new iPhoto now has an iCloud entry under the new Shared section of the left panel where before, you got a Photo Stream entry under Recent. You can add video clips as well as photos to a Sharing folder (but not to your main Photo Stream). When uploading either to a shared album, you can add a comment, to which your co-sharers can reply and even tap a smile to "like" on any of their iDevices.
Strangely, you don't get iPhoto for iOS's Journals feature, which lets you create clever Web-based albums, but you can actually publish a Photo Sharing Stream as a public Web page. You don't create new Shared Streams from this iCloud section, but by using the Share button when in any Event, Album, or other photo view. One interesting option is to create a publicly viewable website, meaning you could use Apple as your photo site host, with the expected classy design values that implies.
New Share Button. This iPhoto update dispenses with the Create button, now delegating all its functions to the Share button. The Facebook share option is still there, but I wish it let you post to a Friend's timeline or in a message instead of just to an album. Flickr sharing, too, lets you specify a photo set, maintains the photo title and description you enter in the app, and lets you set the viewing privacy.
New is simple posting to Twitter, which gets a button on the Share panel. This worked flawlessly, adding a photo viewable right in my Twitter stream. A minor quibble was that when I told the tweeter to add a location for the photo, it used my current location rather than the photo's GPS data. But all of these online sharing options beat the pants off Picasa, which offers no built-in way to share to Facebook, Flickr, or Twitter.
New Printing Interface. For starters, the print interface is now accessible from the Share button, where before you had to dig into menus to get to it. It's more businesslike now, with a full screen preview of the print layout. You can have the photos fit or fill a page, or choose standard sizes like 8x10, 5x7, or 4x6. Contact sheet printing is flexible, letting you choose the number of rows and columns and the margin size. You can also have captions that use common metadata elements like ISO, Shutter Speed, Date, and so on.
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