iLovePhotos – Software Review

Well, with a straightforward and simple name like iLovePhotos, you’d expect a lot from the software to help you make love to your photos and fall in love again with your photos. iLovePhotos is designed to make tagging, finding and sharing your photos of friends and family easy.

iLovePhotos Main Interface

iLovePhotos can import photos from any folder on your hard drive or automatically import/transfer the photos from iPhoto which is a nice little feature. After importing the photos, it will go through your entire library searching for faces to tag. One of the best features that is built in is when you start tagging it will suggest names from within your existing Address Book. The face detection software is pretty good, finding that I had about 80 faces in my test library of 500 iPhone images but of course it’s not perfect since it asked me who this was three times…

iLovePhotos’ face detection isn’t perfect but it did a pretty good job

Some of the other interesting features are that it can automatically email your friend/family anytime a new photo of that person is added to your library. Photos can also be uploaded to iLovePhotos.com automatically, but not to any other service from directly within in the software.

The biggest thing missing from iLovePhotos is editing tools. There aren’t any editing tools other than a rotate photo button. I would think that some sort of an “auto-fix” or a crop tool might be necessary or wanted for most people also, but maybe that will come in a future version. Overall, I’d say that iLovePhotos is going down an interesting but well traveled path.

Unfortunately there is a major downside for this software that should concern most photographers, even if it’s just taking family photos around the house. The Terms of Service (TOS) for using iLovePhotos includes the following paragraph…

In order for Blue Lava to make the Service available to you, you hereby grant Blue Lava a royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide right and license which may be sublicensed or transferred, to use, display, distribute, reproduce, copy, make derivative works from, modify, adapt, transmit, translate, perform, publish and sell your Content in mediums or formats now known or later developed.

Blue Lava, the company that makes iLovePhotos, is absorbing the right to take any photos they want from any user and display or use the photos in any manner they wish, without paying the photographer. This is pretty outrageous, and could be a real risk if you’re uploading pictures of your family and kids and Blue Lava starts using those photos all over the Internet.

If you’re still interested in the software, iLovePhotos can be downloaded from www.ilovephotos.com and is only available for Macs.