First Impressions:
First impression is that nothing has changed from the last iteration, with the exception of a few new buttons and two new categories under Events and Photos.
Flickr export apparently only works with Pro accounts. Way to add value to a Pro account, but not so cool for the folks that have iPhoto, but not necessarily a flikr Pro account. Facebook connectivity I can’t comment on.
I still don’t have a Facebook account. I’m playing a game called, “Don’t Join Facebook.” I may lose eventually, but I’m going for the high score.
Now, onto the big hype, which is Faces. I have a lot of photos. A lot of photos. I’m very interested in tagging them. I’m very not interested in spending weeks going through each photo and tagging each one.
I love the new Faces feature. So far, so good, and I’m getting great results for the time that I’ve put in, which is about five hours or so. I have a full corkboard, and it’s really interesting to see people evolve over the years. I can only guess at the results for children as they grow older, but if you keep at it, you can have one hell of a slideshow on their birthday.
Next, on to iMovie, but that’s another five hours I’ll have to spend playing with it.
Protip: Learn how to use the keyboard shortcuts for Faces. I haven’t timed how long it takes me to process X number of photos, but I can tell you that it’s much, much faster than attempting to do it via the mouse. Like most things.