I spent part of my spring break on a family vacation in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. I love Washington because it’s replete with landmarks that are instantly recognizable across the world. This, of course, is a great opportunity for picture-taking.

Now, I’m not a huge photography nut; I don’t even own a camera. However, the digital era has seen the placement of tiny little cameras inside the millions of cell phones that ride inside our pockets every day. My iPhone 3G, for instance, has such a camera, and although it may be inferior in quality and lacking in features when compared with even the lowest-end of dedicated digital cameras, it does provide some neat features that technophiles should find interesting. Specifically, it can tie into the iPhone’s GPS capabilities to tag each photo with data that indicates exactly where the photo was taken.

In January, Apple released an update to the iLife suite of software that extended the software package’s capabilities in several interesting ways. In particular, several enhancements to iPhoto, the photo management application, were targeted at harnessing the extra data inside of these photos. Now, after I import all of my pictures into iPhoto, the software automatically places them onto a map. After zooming in on Washington, D.C., I can see all of the places we visited last weekend, almost down to the exact place we were standing at the time. This is a really fun way to relive the experience by virtually retracing our steps.

Another cool feature in iPhoto ’09 is called “faces.” This allows the computer to recognize when certain faces appear inside your photos and to tag them with names that you provide. Faces is a very neat concept, as in theory it would allow you to browse your entire photo library by person, but in practice I have found it to be less than reliable. For auto-tagging to work, the photo needs to be very clear — an attribute that is sometimes lacking from hurried cell phone shots — and the person needs to be facing the camera head-on. Still, despite its problems, the Faces feature provides a nice tie-in to Facebook’s tagging feature that avid users will definitely find useful.