Last week Apple announced a new iLife ’11, which includes an updated version of iPhoto. What are the new features?
Full Screen
You can make iPhoto go into full screen mode by clicking on the green button in the upper left. So you won’t see your Dock, or your menu bar, you’ll just see your photos huge without any distractions.
Projects Bookshelf
All your books, cards, and calendars show up as images on a bookshelf, so you can see them all on the screen and quickly recognize them visually.
Books
More book themes, and supposedly easier to make books using their new Autoflow which does layout for you. You can then adjust if you want to make tweaks (move pictures around etc).
Cards
New card themes, including a few letterpress ones. The card is pre-letterpressed with the design, and then they print your color photo(s) onto the existing card. The designs they showcase are New Baby, Holiday, and Birthday–a little limited. Let’s hope there are more, and more generic themes, to come.
Facebook
There’s more integration with Facebook than before. So it’s easy to post photos to your Facebook account or change your profile picture. You can also see the Facebook comments on your photos right inside iPhoto. And iPhoto keeps track of which images from your iPhoto library get uploaded to Facebook. I wonder if you can have 2 different Facebook accounts set up for iPhoto? For example I have a personal account and a business page.
Email
Easier to email photos directly from iPhoto. You can also design photo layouts for the recipient to see, using iPhoto templates. So the recipient doesn’t just see the photos, he sees a message and photo montage if you want. It is supposed to work with MobileMe, Gmail, and AOL. But is that only using Apple Mail, or can I use Entourage for sending my emails?
Slideshows
There are a few new slideshow designs. The Places one, which links all your photos to specific locations on a map and then uses the map as the slideshow theme, looks the most innovative.