Iphoto Facial Recognition

Last year when I attended the Mac world convention and the unveiling of ILife ‘09 took place, I was WOWED by the new features added, especially to Iphoto. Facial recognition was added to this robust software to make photo archival much much easier!

How does it work?

Iphoto ‘09 uses two features to enable facial recognition:

Face Detection

Face Detection looks for the existence of faces in photos.

Face Recognition

Face Recognition separates each face from the other even if you have multiple people in the photos.

Once you add names to the pictures, Iphoto will look for all of the pictures with look alikes. Once it presents you with those images, you can either choose to confirm or reject them.

Rocky Road

That’s not you!

As Wilson Rothman points out in his full review on Iphoto ‘09, in the beginning you get a lot of false positives–for instance, you might have a picture of someone with a purple hat. Iphoto might pull up all of your pictures of all people with purple hats. As you enter more data about  a person with more pictures and manually tag those pictures, then it becomes more accurate in gathering all the pictures of that person. However, sometimes it can get confused with faces at different angles, or with blurry images and you might end up with a lot of unknowns.

Where’s Fido?

Iphoto should be able to recognize your pets. (I still have Iphoto ‘08 so I can’t verify this claim yet–but don’t worry I will upgrade I promise!!)   However, according to Rothman and then Macworld’s article on Iphoto ‘09 , Faces SUCKS with pets! There are reports that it’ll pick up any old object instead of Fido’s face. Of course, you can manually tag them, but what’s the point right? You want Iphoto to pick them out for crying out loud!  I’m sure that Iphoto’s updates will include a fix someday soon. I’ll have to check for more updates on any new changes  and then update this post.