My copy of iLife 09 finally arrived today, two days later than it was supposed to arrive. I chose standard shipping, which turned out to be DHL via USPS. I don’t understand why Apple even bothers with DHL as the middleman. It would probably be easier, faster, and cheaper to just ship it directly via USPS.
The only application I’ve tried so far is iPhoto 09. I haven’t used iPhoto in about a year since I switched to Aperture, so most of the photos in my iPhoto library are at least a year old. With over 3000 pictures in the library, converting it to iPhoto 09 took only a few seconds. Scanning for faces took about 45 minutes.
I find that iPhoto’s face recognition is very erratic. It seems to recognize faces only if the person is facing more or less straight ahead. It often misses faces completely if someone is facing sideways.
iPhoto 09’s built-in Flickr support is pretty weak. It always creates a new photo set for every group of photos uploaded, and it doesn’t let you add keywords or a description when you upload. Thankfully, FlickrExport still works with iPhoto 09.
I still prefer Aperture for several reasons. I like being able to store the originals outside the library, so I can keep them on an external drive. iPhoto 09 still doesn’t let you move the originals after you import them, and when you import from a camera, you can only store them in the library. I also miss Aperture’s editing plugins like Hydra HDR.
On the plus side, iPhoto is a lot faster than Aperture. I find that Aperture can sometimes get painfully slow on my MacBook, even with 4GB RAM.