One of best things about each computer sold by Apple is that its standard software offering includes a version of iLife. One of the best and most used applications in iLife is iPhoto. It has been an essential part of iLife and is one of the tools that make managing your digital media quick and easy on a Mac.

Although iPhoto comes with many great features, it never hurts to enhance its capabilities with a few tools and plugins. Below are 5 great plugins and tools that will help you get the most out of iPhoto.

1. Picasa Web Albums Exporter

We’ve mentioned before that Picasa Web Albums Uploader for iPhoto provides users with a quick and easy way to share photos in with friends and family. This is especially useful if you’re not a MobileMe user. Head over to Google’s Mac section to grab the plugin and install it to quickly and easily upload selected pictures from your iPhoto Library.

2. Duplicate Annihilator

If you’re anything like me, then you’ve been keeping a digital photo library for years. I know my library has moved across a number of computers, operating systems, and platforms and that somewhere along the way I’ve created a duplicate or many.

Duplicate Annihilator is a tool that will look through your photos and determine those that are duplicates. It also gives you a number of different options of what to do with the duplicate files. Running the tool to help clean up your photo collection will speed up iPhoto and make browsing through your pictures more enjoyable.

3. Free Flickr eXporter

FFXPorter is a Free Flickr eXporter plugin for iPhoto that will allow you to quickly upload and add descriptions to your Flickr account. If you’re a big web 2.0 user and have your own social network on Flickr, sharing your photos has never been easier.

Like Picasa Web Albums Exporter you can select the photos in iPhoto and upload the selection to your Flickr account. The Photos will upload and be accessible by your Flickr contacts.

4. GrowlPhoto

GrowlPhoto is a plugin that adds iPhoto notifications to Growl. If you’re not already using Growl, you’ve been missing out on quick and un-intruding system notifications.

GrowlPhoto will let you know when your large photo imports have finished and are ready for you to work with. This will make it easy for you to do other tasks on your computer while you wait for your imports to finish.

5. Facebook Exporter for iPhoto

Like FFXPorter and Picasa Web Albums, Facebook Exporter for iPhoto allows you to quickly share your photos with your friends and contacts. This plugin makes exporting photos directly to Facebook quick and easy.

The plugin includes the ability to add captions, tag your friends, and write a description of the pictures you’re uploading to your Facebook site. After you’ve uploaded your pictures they’ll be included in your Facebook photo section and ready for your friends to see.

Conclusion

Many of the plugins for iPhoto focus on making it easy to share your pictures with others. As the internet continues to expand and social networks become stronger through internet tools these type of plugins make use of iPhoto that much more enjoyable and useful.

What plugins and tools do you use with iPhoto?

The Apple Blog recently pointed to a very useful application if you’re constantly frustrated by your Mac going into sleep mode while you’re trying to watch a movie. Caffeine is a free application that allows you to control when your screen can and can’t go to sleep.

Download and install the application to start enjoying movies, tv shows, and youtube without having to worry about your monitor dimming or turning off. Caffeine installs a menu item that allows you to quickly adjust your monitor sleep settings. Be sure to set it back to sleep when you finish the video.. You want to make sure you save every penny on those electric bills.

For those Mac users out there that are big fans of Google Docs or Google bookmarks, then Google has just the spotlight plugin that you’re looking for.

Google recently announced on their Google Mac Blog the availability of Precipitate, a spotlight or quicksilver plugin that allows you to search and launch your Google Docs and Google Bookmarks.

If your Google Docs library has gotten large and you’d like to be able to quickly search and access those documents from within OS X, then Precipitate is just what you need.

You can download Precipitate from the Google Code library and install its preference pane by opening the downloaded file.

After the file has been downloaded and installed you’ll need to navigate to the Precipitate Preference Pane in system preferences and enter your google account, including “@gmail.com” and your google password. From here Precipitate will connect to your Google Docs and add them to your search results.

Once Precipitate has finished adding Google Docs to Spotlight, you can search for .gdocs to see all Google Docs now included in your Spotlight search results.

To continue our recent theme of iPhone related posts, I thought I’d comment about the iPhone availability. Recent reports have stated that the iPhone was sold out across most of the Apple and At&t stores . If you are one of the few lucky individuals that plan to purchase an iPhone and still have some available at your local Apple store, be prepared to wait in line. Long lines.
Today, I ventured to the Apple Store in Tysons Corner Virginia to see if they had any iPhones left available.. And I was shocked to see a line of over 100 people waiting in front of the Apple store waiting for the phone. I didn’t expect that many people to be waiting in line in the middle of a Friday, but Apple store employees were helping invididuals in a few at a time to purchase and activate their iPhones.

So, while supplies are short at many Apple stores, it appears that the stores that still have an iPhone, have plenty of them to sell.
If you’d like to check to see if your local store has iPhone available to purchase, visit the Apple Availability site after 9pm to see what stock is available for the next day purchase. Additionally, it appears that new iPhones are being delivered almost every day.

Taking screenshots on the iPhone and iPod touch have gotten very very easy after the 2.0 software update.

To take a screenshot on your iPhone or iPod touch:

1. Hold Down the Home Button
2. Tap the power button on the top of your iPhone or iPod touch

You’ll know that the screenshot has been taken because the screen will flash all white. This works while watching video and doing almost everything else on the iPhone/iPod Touch.

Once the screenshot has been taken you can access it in your Photo app. From here you can email it or send it via mobileme back to your other computers.

So, if you’d like to share with everyone you know how awesome it is to have the new iPhone and updated iPod touch then take those screenshots and send them everywhere.