Apple iPhoto was first released in 2002 and is the flagship image manipulation software for Mac users. It can be used for editing, printing and sharing digital pictures among users and is usually included as a part of the iLife Suite on Mac computers. With the help of this program users can directly import their pictures from all their scanners or digital cameras or even the internet and save them on the iPhoto Library. Most of the common image file formats are supported and the software also works with any additional plugins with most makes of digital cameras as well as scanners.
Users can label, tilt, and organize their photos in ‘events’ or groups. There are also some basic image manipulation tools like red eye filters, brightness adjustments, contrast adjustments, resizing and cropping tools and a few others.
The user interface for iPhoto is extremely clean, simple and user friendly program and can be used by a complete beginner. This is especially the case for the sharing features, which can convert pictures into beautiful slideshows with usic from the iTunes library as a soundtrack. These slideshows can even be shared as QuickTime movies. The users can then edit them in iMovie and iDVD can also be used to burn the files to disc.
The photo albums can also be synced with iPods. Moreover, they can be viewed on televisions that support such a format and playback option. iPhoto users are even offered digital prints, cards, album volumes etc., but only in selected markets.
The program is very slick and makes for an excellent photo viewer as well.
