Well, not good for me.

I bought a family pack of iLife 11 to get the latest iPhoto 
(confusingly, it seems to be v.9). I have the iLife 09 issue, with 
the usual updates. As usual, you need to update the libraries so you 
can't re-open them in older iPhotos. Yeah, right!

What I found was that the interface is not nearly as user friendly 
for me as the old interface. To start with, it is based on black 
rather than gray or white. Ugh! Didn't Apple go with the paper white 
screen because . . . ?

But black is a bit of a new fashion in computer graphics now that we 
aren't forced to use white or color on black as in the bad old days.

But the thing that completely throws me is that the "i" information 
space, bottom left in the older version, is now just blank space and 
you have to click on "i" at bottom right on the window to open a 
column which is white/color on black and on the right. This column 
takes quite a large slice off the side of the window in which you are 
looking at your pix. I have mine set to roughly four or five pix 
across -- this new column takes out the space occupied by the fourth 
pic across, then reshuffles all the pix so now they fit into three 
across. But hey, that's just re-arranged the display set-up that I 
liked! I wanted four (or five) across at a certain size so I could 
comfortably see a certain number of pix at a time in the window!

When you select a photo this column displays the EXIF info which is 
good, and more than the previous version I have does, BUT the space 
for a description reveals only a couple of lines, and most of the 
column is dedicated to "Faces" and location information -- neither of 
which are of any use to me. I can see they would be to some people, 
but surely it should be optional?

And there seems to be no way to adjust that Description space. There 
is in the older version.

There seems to be no improvement in what is offered by way of editing 
or saving. The editing in iPhoto 09 is pretty useful but the saving 
is a disaster -- when you've finished editing and hit "Done" or 
double click to return that picture to thumbnail size, iPhoto saves 
with a savage JPEG squeeze. Not good and no option.

So there you go! Fortunately, I have a back-up so I have moved back 
to that, but I've wasted $99 buying the "upgrade".

Best regards

Geoffrey Heard
The Ad-Doctor-Online
http://www.ad-doctor-online.com