Product Reviews

The latest upgrade to iPhoto, Apple's photo-cataloguing and editing suite brings some much-needed improvements and extremely nice touches to an already-excellent application.

The first and most important is the speed improvement. With our 1500-image library sorted into multiple standard and smart albums, not to mention books, iPhoto 5 was at best sluggish. Not so iPhoto 6: opening and closing the application is much zippier and you can now scroll through an entire library without the spinning beachball making an appearance. What's more, general viewing and editing is a much more pleasant experience.

Apple has made some cosmetic changes to iPhoto: the application's font is different, closed albums now show how many images they contain, and there's a new floating palette that displays the dates when the images were taken as you scroll through an open album.

Version 6 also boasts new books, and many users will welcome the introduction of calendars and cards. Creating and editing these is a simple and speedy affair - indeed, auto-flowing large books takes a matter of seconds rather than the minutes it could take in previous versions.

Photocasting is Apple's new name for RSS photo streaming, and the overall implementation is very good. Simply click on an album,

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go to the Share menu and select the required options. When someone subscribes to your photocast, the images are downloaded to their machine, where they can make books and cards or simply view the images. You can allow users to get actual-size images or smaller versions for faster viewing. The photocast will automatically update when you make any changes, and you can set a password to keep out unwanted viewers. Users don't have to subscribe through iPhoto and can use their own RSS feeder to view images, which is a particularly nice touch.

The image editing process remains very much the same, but the iPhoto team was obviously looking over the shoulders of those working on Aperture, as the full-screen editing mode tips are more than just a nod to the professional photo editing tool. In full-screen mode, you can look at the single image or compare the original with any updated versions you make. This makes editing a simple process for the uninitiated and a much more pleasant experience overall.

The floating Effects palette will make immediate sense to those who have used the Variations option in Photoshop, except that the options are set. There are nine options: black and white, sepia, antique, fade colour, boost colour, matte, vignette, edge blur and revert to original.

The new iPhoto is worth every penny of the £55 it costs to purchase the entire iLife suite. The main new features are all welcome upgrades. Photocasting, in particular, is a great feature that families and friends will find extremely useful - and if you've run out of .Mac space, you don't need to cough up more cash to share your images.

If you're new to iLife, iPhoto will impress no end, while existing users will be happy with the added-value features and ecstatic over the massive speed jump. The quality of this application just gets better and better with each incarnation.