Apple released its new iLife ‘08 suite of applications yesterday. I am intrigued by the new iPhoto and how it helps to organize your photos. Changing the name of a collection of images from ‘Albums’ to ‘Events’ is particularly interesting. This change of terminology not only simplifies the photo organizing process, it also makes users think differently about how they categorize their images.

Apple chose to organize images around events, which reflects the circumstances around which most pictures are taken. If you go on a vacation in the Outer Banks, NC, you typically want to keep these photos together. You take pictures at your child’s fifth birthday party, you want all of those pictures in one place. Apple makes it really easy to do this. From what I can see from the demos (I have not been able to use it as of yet), images are automatically organized by the day they were taken. Since most pictures are taken sequentially over the course of an event, organizing images into in this way becomes simple. iPhoto’s interface makes it incredibly easy to string together multiple days into a single event, or split a day into two or more events.

Arranging photos into albums is the old, physical-world way to organize photos. Typically, we fill our photo albums up until they are full of pictures. So, our organization is based upon how many pictures the album holds. In the digital world, the size of the album is no longer relevant. So, the old term of ‘album’ and the organization scheme associated with albums has become obsolete. Apple has recognized this, and has thus changed the name of organizing images in iPhoto to ‘Events’. This not only makes organizing photos easier, it helps the user to think differently about the process.

Could this small change in terminology be a tipping point in how users organize photos?