Full FeedPractically, iPhoto’s Faces fails
One of iPhoto ‘09’s key features is Faces, which uses face detection and recognition to organize photo albums by face. This may not be the highest on people’s “want” lists for iPhoto ‘09, but it certainly is a cool idea. You want to look at photos of John? Just click on his snapshot on the corkboard. Personally, though, I’m having trouble finding it useful in most practical situations.
When Phil Schiller demoed Faces at Macworld, the photos he was using were well lit, head-on photos, and the subjects were basically making the same face every time. For people who have iPhoto libraries chock full of mannequins, this may help out quite a bit. But for people like me, who use iPhoto for snapshots (I use Aperture for more professional photography), it becomes kind of a pain.
Phil would have had us believe that iPhoto was magic and automatically found tons and tons of photos, but this didn’t seem to the the case for me. Once Faces had finished it’s scan, I started naming a few people in my photos. After naming people in about 20 photos, I returned to Faces to see how things were going. Turns out, it had found a bunch of photos, most of them with the wrong people in them. In quite a few photos, it had completely missed a huge, well-lit face, and marked a tiny face in a photograph in the background, which I found bizarre.
Overall, Faces took way too much coddling, and I wouldn’t trust it to get people right on a new import of photos. I spent most of my time not confirming faces, but going through my photos and naming people over and over, showing iPhoto new faces, and deleting the faces it found in trees and bookshelves, in hopes that it would become smarter. But it really didn’t. The final straw for me was when I came to a set of about ten photos, all taken within seconds from a tripod with the self timer. There was basically no movement from picture to picture, and yet, iPhoto was unable to recognize even a single one of us from one picture to the next, even after I had named people three times.
Bottom line, Faces would be great if you do professional portraits and want a quick way of organizing them, or if you love taking pictures of friends and want some way to easily find them and don’t really care about perfection. For me, there was so much teaching going on without iPhoto learning anything that I think it might have been just as easy to manually tag everyone in every photo…not like that’s far off from what I did.
How has your iLife/iPhoto ‘09 experience been going? Sound off in the comments below.
Product [iPhoto]
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I tend to agree with most everything you said. I also had to do a lot of extreme fine tuning to get the face recognition correct. In my case, I have a ton of photos from Madame Tusaud’s Wax Museum in NYC, and it took almost 1.2 of those pictures and labeled them as ME, LOL. The face recognition is fun to kill time, but not at all practical in my opinion.
on February 11, 2009 at 05:06 PM - LINKYeah, it’s a fun feature, and slightly useful, but something I could do without, and certainly something that shouldn’t have been the focus of keynote.
on February 11, 2009 at 05:27 PM - LINKHopefully Apple has an update in the near future can addresses some of these issues.
on February 11, 2009 at 10:38 PM - LINKI have not had nearly that much difficulty. I also use Aperture for my more serious work. Once I figured out that going into Faces, double clicking on a face, and then confirming or rejecting iPhoto’s suggestions in the bottom pane (single click to confirm, double click to reject), I found the number of false positives in the realm of reason. What I have really liked about it is that it found quite a few older pictures (some old scans) that I had forgotten that I had. It even recognized some family members correctly in pictures from 30+ years ago that I had scanned. Once it was trained it works pretty well. The most surprising find was that it recognized a picture of a picture where I had a picture of my Dad sitting on my desk (the picture was a picture of my desk with my Dad’s pic framed in the shot). My only complaint is that I had to spend about an hour training it to get really good results. It has a tough time with recognizing infants->toddlers->kids when multiple pictures of the same kid over various stages of their development were present but I expected that. I also have a few family members that almost never simply smile in pictures and as such iPhoto had a tough time recognizing them. I can’t tell if it can use a profile shot of a person at all yet to help it learn.
on February 13, 2009 at 09:40 AM - LINKI will say on a somewhat funny note that I’m glad I wasn’t trying to train this thing in front of a bunch of family. Some of its suggestions were pretty hilarious including suggesting that a pattern on a brick wall was a relative of mine. I think they need to include a “this is not a face you freaking robot” option.
iPhoto Faces is the worst thing to come from Apple in a while. A resource hog that would make Microsoft developers drool. At the very least we as users should have had the option to disable it. That wouldn’t be asking for TOO much would it?
on September 8, 2009 at 10:06 PM - LINK