iLife ’09 arrived around 2 hours ago and after a fairly lengthy installation process my first port of call was iPhoto. As I write this it is currently scanning through all my photos for faces. There’s approximately 40 minutes left on that.

One of the things I was most looking forward to, as were many of Fruit Bytes visitors, was the Flickr upload integration added to iPhoto. For the past 12 months I have used FlickrExport which will upload individual photos from an event or as many as I select within an event. I can also add tags, title and description within the FlickrExport window. This plugin cost £12 from ConnectedFlow.

iLife '09

I thought that the Flickr integration in iPhoto would be similar to that of FlickrExport, however sadly it’s very basic indeed and rather than being able to select individual images from an event, it will only upload the whole event and worse still create a new set within Flickr! I always take more than one photo of everything and rarely (read: hardly ever!) would I upload a whole event to Flickr, much less would I want to create a whole new set out of it!

EDIT: On testing, highlighting one photo in an event will send that individual photo up and not the whole event as originally stated. However, it still creates a new set in Flickr for this one photo. That’s still a little offputting, but at least it will upload individual images which is good.

Following the installation there was an iLife Media Browser Update available in Software Update which would “improve overall stability and address a number of other minor issues”. Once I’d installed that and restarted, the Flickr button in iPhoto was rendered useless. It took a few shut downs of the application before it worked again, but it’s still a bit patchy even now.

Thus far I haven’t had the opportunity to look at Faces and Places in iPhoto, nor any other applications within the iLife ’09 suite. I’ll admit to being quite disappointed so far, particularly with the Flickr upload integration. I have decided to stick with FlickrExport but do hope that Apple will offer an update in the near future that gives us more control over the photos we upload and not insisting on creating a whole new set each time. Of course the problem with using anything other than the integrated Flickr media button is that even if one marks a photo on the ‘Places’ map in iPhoto, this information will not be uploaded to Flickr.