Over the course of my last few posts I’ve been muzing about a cool and interesting way to approach the ever growing media library we have at home.  In my last post took the idea far enough to sketch it out and provide a rough draft of the functionality.

Now fast forward, a couple of months and someone has actually gone ahead and built it…. well kinda.

Back in mid Jan, the fine people at Apple released iPhoto ‘09. It is, as far as I’m aware, the one piece of software which comes closest to what I would like a familiy oriented piece of media management software to be. It has all the feature I’ve described my “PictoSense” post except for the neat integration of time, keywords and location in a single pane. It’s a shame they didn’t push their software that far though.

That being said the bright minds at apple did come up with a feature I truly find astounding: faces. Or rather, the facial recognition within the faces feature of iPhoto. Now that’s what I call a time saver. On the few hundred images I’ve let it loose on it has managed a hit rate of over 80%. That’s so many pictures I don’t have to manually tag, Great!

I truly hope that someone will end up putting all thee elements on a single screen.