Apple Shipping iLife '09 Tuesday

Apple on Tuesday plans to start shipping to retailers an upgrade to its iLife software package for Macintosh computers.

ILife '09 contains major updates to iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand, Apple said Monday. The package also includes iWeb '09 for creating Web sites and iDVD '09 for creating DVDs.

Apple unveiled the iLife upgrade, which will be priced at $79, at the Macworld conference in San Francisco this month. The most innovative feature in the upgrade is in the iPhoto application. Apple has added face-recognition technology to enable users to organize and find photos based on the faces of subjects. In addition, the software is able to read the geo tags placed in photos by the global positioning systems in the latest digital cameras and Apple's iPhone 3G.

By reading the data, the software can organize and locate photos based on where they were taken. In addition, the software uses Google's mapping application to place pins of the locations on a world map, which can be zoomed in to specific areas.

Besides announcing iLife '09, Apple introduced an online service called iWork.com that enables people to collaborate on documents and presentations created in iWork '09, the company's desktop office productivity suite. The service, which launched in beta during Macworld, enables a user to upload content and then have others access the material through a Web browser. People can share notes and comments online.

As a collaboration service, iWork.com is an Apple-centric version of similar services available by Google and other Internet companies. But while those services are mostly free, Apple plans to eventually charge for the use of iWork.com. The beta version, however, is available at no charge.