Faces in iPhoto 8 (iLife ’09)

Faces completed scanning my library in about 90 minutes.

The first photo I opened, one of my niece, was not recognized as a face. Odd because it is a fairly clear shot of her, but maybe the face is too small or blurry.

There is a button labeled “Add missing face” which I clicked. You get a bounding box to put around the face. I resized the box and then named her. A popup appeared enticing me to click “Faces” on the left side to see more photos of her.

I clicked Faces and double clicked her corkboard photo. No other photos of her were found, so maybe it has issues with children. I’ll find more photos of her myself……..

I chose a picture of my brother and her at Disneyland and it recognized the faces. I named them both and exactly what I was hoping for happened. As I typed my niece’s name, a list showed up with matching names, of which there was one. I was able to teach iPhoto that the other photo and this one are the same person!

I’ve played around with Faces for about 45 minutes now and I am very impressed.

As you start out, Faces makes a tremendous amount of accurate guesses and also seems to get some terribly wrong, presumably because the data set is limited. As you confirm or reject photos, the accuracy gets better.

One missing feature is the ability to look at a photo while in confirming mode. iPhoto shows you a zoomed in face but you can’t see the entire context of the photo, which would be useful for some photos were the face is not well in focus or the person is in costume.

I’m going to keep training iPhoto to see how accurate it becomes over time.