  We combine recent progress in measuring the branching ratio of the decay
B->X_d gamma$ with the discovery that hadronic uncertainties in the CP-averaged
branching ratio drop out to a large extent. Implications of these improvements
on the size of possible new physics effects are investigated. We find the
updated SM prediction for the CP-averaged branching ratio to be Br[B->X_d
gamma]^SM_E_gamma>1.6 GeV = 1.54^+0.26-0.31*10^-5, which should be compared
with the experimental value of Br[B->X_d gamma]^exp_E_gamma>1.6GeV =
(1.41+-0.57) 10^-5. After performing a model independent analysis, we consider
different new physics models: the MSSM with generic sources of flavor
violation, the two Higgs doublet model of type III and a model with
right-handed charged currents. It is found that the constraints on the SUSY
parameters delta^d_13 have improved and that the absolute value of the
right-handed quark mixing matrix element |V^R_td| must be smaller than
1.5*10^-4.
