I’ve been using iPhoto’11 a lot more in recent months after being a heavy iPhoto’09 user. Three observations:
1) they changed a lot of UI to make it appear slicker. Generally, it’s a lot less intuitive though. For example, to edit the date of a photo you need to go to a menu option instead of editing it right in the info pane.
2) face recognition got better (no surprise). Happily they added a UI for wading through all unnamed faces, but it’s hard to find and won’t let you look at the whole photo for context
3) behind the scenes, the SQLite database that holds metadata is completely different. All the same data is there, but the joins all need to be rewritten from scratch. I suspect the new schema comes from Aperture, but it might just be a CoreData rewrite.
I was fairly disappointed by the UI changes. Things that I could immediately see and change (caption, keywords) under each photo have been hidden and require use of the info panel on the right. OTOH, that info panel does make it easier to type in keywords for many photos simultaneously. Worse yet is the broken way the emails are composed for notifying people of gallery shares (not being able to use Mail and being forced to do it within iPhoto and its extremely limited email composition and addressing capabilities). I did consider a couple of times how I might revert to ’09.
T. Kim Nguyen I completely agree about the Mail change. I forgot to mention it in my original post. It’s the worst change they made because the dumbed-down mail editor bundled with iPhoto is horrible and not overrideable.
A basic feature missing out of that email is groups! ie. I have a “photos” group in Address Book but cannot use it inside iPhoto 11. Sometimes Apple really messes up.