iLife '09

For those who want to have the very best in keeping your Apple memories that look professional.

I only use the iPhoto app in iLife 9 and this version is so slow at loading 1000 plus image libraries, I just got frustrated. iPhoto 7 is eye blinking quick at loading my large libraries (have 10 libraries; 1999, 2000....2010) full of digital and scanned images. iPhoto 9 has the face recognition feature that runs all the time whether you want it to or not and it is a resources hog. Slows everything down. A simple on/off switch in the preferences pane would make version 9 much more palatable; faster. If Apple ever updated iPhoto 9 with and on/off switch for faces, I may try it again. Right now it is just too darn slow. Too, my macbook has a 2 ghz processor and 4 meg of ram. That is plenty of horsepower for properly written apps. iLife 9 just isn't one. iLife 7 is.

...I read the reviews of this product and was slightly concerned, but decided to go ahead and make the purchase. If there were an option for zero stars, I would choose that. I purchased the battery for my husband. It arrived partially charged (which is normally a good thing). My husband let it run down and attempted to give it a full charge and went through all the typical setup procedures to reset his charging system, but it didn't do a bit of good. The battery was also slightly warped. Needless to say, said product is currently on its way back to the seller and we are expecting a full refund. I do not recommend this particular battery. If you have a Mac, spend the full amount and buy directly from Apple.

If you bought a Mac anytime recently, you should already have a version of iLife as most Macs come with it. This includes iPhoto for weak photo editing and gallery creation (like Google's Picasa), GarageBand for music production, iWeb for posting your media/life to the web, iMovie for video editing and iDVD for burning to a DVD.

Most of these are decent apps. GarageBand is well considered, and if you want to do video podcasts, iMovie is okay. It's not as powerful as Final Cut (Pro/Express), but pretty good. iDVD is not a great DVD writer, but it does the job. Here are some of the limitations in iLife 09:

iWeb doesn't let you edit the page theme (template) HTML in any meaningful way, and you can't create new templates.

iMovie does not have any fancy effects. Previous versions did; they were removed in 08.

iMovie does not integrate well to iDVD - you must "Share" media between them, which can take 4x real time on a current-version MacBook laptop.

iDVD cannot set arbitrary chapter markers. (You do that in iMovie.) To set Titles, you must import the clips separately. But iMovie can't "Share to iDVD" more than one clip at a time so you have to do non-standard stuff for that.

(This means that if you want to put video onto DVD, e.g. from your camera or digitized from your VCR, you must import it into iMovie - takes a long time and transcodes - do the editing, chapter markers, etc., - and then export to iDVD which again takes a long time and does more quality-reducing transcoding, create the menus and structure, and then burn it - another set of transcoding. Very time consuming and lots of transcoding.)

Most of these programs support "Themes", but the Themes aren't easily editable.

iDVD does not support BluRay.

In fairness, the primary video alternatives are programs like Roxio's Toast and "DVD Creator", neither of which support real editing or manual chapter markers at all and have less impressive menu structures. But both of those do support BluRay.

So the real question isn't whether iLife is useful, but whether an upgrade from iLife 08 (or whatever version you have) to iLife 09 is worth the cost.

iLife 09
Variety of Apps for budding artists (video, web, music)

We have it installed on 3 of our Macs and each person uses a different part more than the other family member.
It works for real basic edits and operations.
a few people have already put some In depth reviews on each program in the box. Please read those as they are very good.

I tend to use the iWeb for quick web edits and to see what a few of my potential pages will look like. My daughter uses it to keep up her site.
She is he one to play around with the music. I can't rate that area since my musical talents are along the lines of humming.

Video edits work great. I know i can't get into the depth or capability of final cut or even adobe premier but for taking a youtube type video and using in my classroom this program works flawlessly and quickly. If I do have the time and want to go extreme I take my iMovie version and edit it in premier.
but for getting a point across, cutting family clips together iMovie works. only wish the sound part gave me some ability to edit it in multiple channels to meet the HD of today and keep it for the future.

We've been using iPhoto (and Ilife) for a long time all because of what iPhoto brings. in the beginning it was basically for storage. I'm not a fan of the storage now with no folders to go get my pictures by the year or month. but it works nicely to keep my young ones from trying to get into and play w/ the pictures.
the editing is basic but for quick fixes and storage it works nicely for me.
when i need to edit them in more depth i use lightroom.

the price from Amazon is fantastic and if something is wrong swapping for a good version is painless.
Snow Leopard compatible. Hoping the upcoming version make use of my 64bit processor better.