Product Reviews

While iPhoto 4 has had plenty of updates, its headline feature - increased speed - threatens to cast a shadow over all the rest. This is no doubt down to clever cacheing, which explains why it insists on upgrading your existing photo library the first time it's run, with a warning that you can't revert. It will now happily handle 25,000 photos, which is a quantum leap from the previous limit of just a few thousand.

Keeping track of so many pictures was never going to be easy, so Apple has introduced two new forms of index: by date and by rating. The first is automatic, with iPhoto sorting pictures into year-based folders. This isn't a patch on Photoshop Album's monthly calendar view, or the photo timeline that runs across the top of its library window, but at least you'll be able to quickly locate those snaps from your Halkidiki holiday - unless you went there every year.

The second index is far more advanced, allowing you

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to rate photos out of five in much the same way that you can rate tracks in iTunes. By creating a new 'smart album', you can then filter the library on the basis of keywords, dates and ratings, and easily keep track of the best shots of your dog or corporate presentations. The smart album will update as you add new photos to your library and give them ratings or keywords that match those of the album. Anything from a single album to the whole library can then be shared using Rendezvous, just like an iTunes playlist.

Funky features

A range of new tools increases the number of editing jobs you can undertake, without resorting to more powerful software. You might find these rather limited though, as there's little in the way of tweakable parameters. But if all you want to do is quickly throw an album on the Internet after the briefest of edits, they should do the trick.

Slideshows have been beefed up on all fronts - there's a range of four transitions that mimic the cube, wipe, mosaic and fade effects of Keynote, and you can use anything from your iTunes playlist as backing music, including your GarageBand compositions. Controls within the slideshow allow you to skip backwards and forwards, and even rotate and rate the images, but pausing doesn't halt the music.

If you look beyond the headlines, then iPhoto has plenty to offer besides improved handling of larger libraries. And when Apple launches book publishing across Europe in March, it might even pose a threat to online photo printing services.