Known as OS X (pronounced 10), it is built with Unix, the powerful OS favoured by big corporations for their mission critical servers but unintelligible to ordinary users.

I couldn't fathom the point of how a photo editing package would complete an OS, when Microsoft was pushing hard to integrate web communication software like messaging and media players. I still don't know the answer but iPhoto is quite something.

It is far and away the most easy to use package of this nature I've ever used and as part of the consumer oriented thrust of OS X, it is a brilliant stratagem. The most common digital peripheral is a camera, and the thing most consumers want to do is see their pictures, fiddle with them, and invariably email them to family and friends.

But this has been easier said than done in the past. Apple boss Steve Jobs called it the "chain of pain" - importing, editing, and printing digital pictures.

The software does the former very simply, displaying them as thumbnails that can be resized (and therefore display as many as several hundred images on screen) on the fly. This was the most impressive, as it handled a lot of the images, of different resolution, from tiny to full-screen - all in real-time.

Mac feature Part 1: My month on a mac Part 2: Everything's fine at the Office Part 3: iMac makes you a pix pro

Many of these features have been available in other programs over the last few years, but iPhoto is a cut above. Rotating the image, for instance, is done by clicking on one button, which this as you see the image, without any additional "save as" functions. Cropping is as easy, with constraints that make the image fit to the most common photo formats.

You can display your images by creating "albums", then let them run as a "slide show". This scrolls the images every five seconds across the full screen of the iMac's super-clear flat-panel monitor.

What I particularly liked is that it puts all the pictures into one central "photo library" not a series of folders named by date or time, when they are imported. The software always remembers the "last import", as well as the "rolls" of film in case you ever want to arrange them after the fact.

Importing itself is much easier than anything else I've ever tried. To test this I used the HP

Photosmart 318 digital camera. To import the images to my laptop, I had to install its bundled software, while the iMac recognised it as soon as I plugged it in, launched iPhoto and hey presto.

When some friends adopted a baby girl, it provided me with the opportunity to test the sharing features. I took the images, edited them and turned them into an HTML page so my friend's family in New Zealand could see the happy parents.

My wife, a web designer, took two hours to do the same on her computer, using two other top-end packages, one to edit the pictures and the other for web authoring. Hers was much better and allowed you to scroll through the pictures but, for the average consumer, being able to create a page in five mouse clicks is very impressive.

If her parents lived in the United States, I could have used another "share" service where the pictures can be printed and bound as a book. It is not available here.

You can also export the pictures as a Quicktime file, so that they play as a slide show in this popular movie clip format, or as smaller resolution images for e-mailing.

All of these export functions let you choose from a variety of templates and fiddle with the backgrounds and titles.

While Windows-based packages have been doing this for longer, iPhoto, true to the whole philosophy of Apple, does it better and easier.

Similarly, the iMovie package that lets you create your own films is as easy to use.

To edit my wedding video, I asked photographer Daron Chatz, who runs Y-Fronts Productions, for help, but didn't need it. Chatz used the words "real time" and "easy" as often as the word "amazing" with the kind of professional appreciation a tech junkie like me can appreciate. "It's not complex but its high power," he concluded.

Indeed, the interface is simple enough: the main window (with icons for play, fast forward, rewind) has a panel down the right for the "clips" and a bar that runs across the bottom of the screen for the sequence of the movie, known as the timeline. It was mostly "drag and drop" editing, dragging the clips onto the time line and inserting transitions between them where needed.

I inserted a soundtrack, edited some of the clips quite easily where they were to long, even inverted one so that it zoomed out instead of in. If necessary, you can edit frame by frame, I found.

The more sophisticated effects where as easy - letting me insert titles, make some clips run in slow motion, adjusting the colour saturation, make the image black and white or sepia - but also let me restore to the original at any point.

Of these effects Chatz said: "Just look how simple that is. That's real time, that's fantastic," adding that "the point is, it is all pre-automated. In professional editing programs you have to set everything up yourself. The control are very user-friendly."

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