iPhoto has come a long way since it debuted. So far in fact that it skipped an entire version number, 3. But I'm not here to rehash iPhoto itself, rather a couple of 3rd party enhancements that make iPhoto all that more useful.

The first is iPhotoToGallery. I'll admit that this is useful to me because I use Gallery on my web server to manage my online photos and it will only be useful to you if you do the same. That being said, it's nice that iPhoto has the ability to be extended like this. Before this plug-in I had to export the photos, then upload them, and finally do all the Gallery album configurations. Now I export directly from iPhoto to Gallery, doing all the configuration in the plug-in interface. Slick. The newest version has Keychain support and other security enhancing features.

The second unfortunately isn't out yet, but it hooks iPhoto up to Typepad using the Atom API. I don't have a Typepad account and I don't have the code, but again I feel this is a very cool way to extend iPhoto.

This by no means covers all the ways that iPhoto has been extended, just ways that caught my fancy. You can always search VersionTracker, or your favorite mac update site for iPhoto goodies.

By the way, does anybody know what the check mark keyword in iPhoto is for? It adds a little icon to the thumbnail preview and I can't find out what significance it has. Drop a note in the QuickTopic if you have any clues.