iPhoto 5

Apple released iLife 05 today, and I have spent much of the morning playing with iPhoto 5. I'm not sure what changes have been made to the app under the bonnet but it really whizzes through my library of nearly 3500 photos. The new features are fantastic. There are lots of new editing and formating tools. The new slideshow functions are a pleasure to use and make creating slideshows incredibly easy. For me though, the best bit is the way in which Apple has finally allowed us to make use of their fantastic database app to store our movies. Most digital cameras these days can make little movies. I had a whole load of these on my Mac wondering what to do with them. I tried a couple of apps over the last few months from developers who saw the gap in the market, but they just weren't smooth enough. Well, iPhoto 5 imports them along with the photos and a double click will play them in Quicktime player. Just what I was looking for. The sad irony is that I had found the perfect app for managing my movies. I found it just last week, just after I had heard about this new feature in iPhoto. It's called MovieGallery and it is a great little app. I would have bought it, but for Apple and their damn fine software. I would give iPhoto 4½/5 (I just wish I could sort my photos according to their size). This is easily the finest software in the world for organising photographs. Buy it now, or if you're a Windows users buy yourself a new iMac G5 and get it for free.