Could new iPhoto person and location tagging carry over to iPhone?

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Apple showed off the new version of its iPhoto image editing software today at the Macworld expo. The application will tie in with the most popular photo-sharing websites, Facebook and Flickr, allowing users to post their snapshots without the need to download additional plugins or purchase MobileMe. Support for uploading to Picasa Web Albums is notably absent, but Google’s new Picasa for Mac has that covered.

iPhone GPS, soon with photos? (Photo credit: Rpongsaj via Flickr.)

The soon-to-be-released iPhoto ’09 incorporates signature features of each social networking website. Users will be able to tag faces in photos and view all their pictures of a particular person, just like on Facebook. And like Flickr, the software also will use GPS data recorded by some cameras (the one on an iPhone, for example) and display the location they were taken on a Google map.

The faces and places data carry over to images uploaded to Facebook and Flickr, respectively.

I can think of two consumer devices that could benefit from this photo data. (Hint: they’re both touch-screen gadgets made by Apple.) But Apple hasn’t said yet how this could be applied to the iPhone and iPod Touch. After all, Phil Schiller, the company’s senior vice president of marketing, did say in his keynote that today was ‘all about the Mac’ (well, before he went on to talk about iTunes and other Apple software).

But let’s think about this for a second. Does the iPhone have a photo viewer? Check. Google Maps? Check. Contact lists? Check. Imagine flipping through your contact list, picking a friend’s name and getting a list of all the photos that person is tagged in.

Or what about having all your pictures mapped on your phone? Aha, those annoying ‘camera would like to use your current location’ messages that keep popping up on our iPhones are starting to make a lot more sense.

-- Mark Milian