Does iPhoto’s Faces Work?
After purchasing Apple's new iLife '09 suite of software, the first feature I wanted to explore is iPhoto's Faces. It has been one of the most talked about and anticipated features of iPhoto '09. Similar to the face recognition technology found in newer digital compact cameras, faces attempts to scan all your images in your iPhoto library and identify individual faces in them. Macworld attendees oohed and awed the feature when Phil Schiller presented it in early January.
Well after spending a couple of hours exploring and using the tool yesterday, I personally found using iPhoto's Faces not that much different from simply selecting and applying keywords to photos in your iPhoto library. In my experience so far, Faces is not a very efficient visual recognition program. If all your photos in your library were shot and looked like well-developed stocked images, then Faces would probably be much more successful. But then again, maybe not.
I mainly use iPhoto to store and manage all my family photos. (I use Aperture for professional work.) So I have digital photos dating back from 2003 primarily of my children. Well, Faces unfortunately does not easily recognize their growth from year to year or even from photo to photo. First off you have to train Faces to know what to look for. You have to select and name a person's face several times before Faces kicks in and starts identifying that same face in other photos. When it goes through this process, it will deliver up a handful of images in which it thinks a selected face appears. You have to then go through those suggestions and confirm or reject the correct recognitions. I couldn't figure out exactly how the recognition works. But obviously it looks at skin tone, eyes, chin, and other facial features as part of the recognition process. But what I don't understand is why when I select "select" and name say my daughter's face in one photo that Faces doesn't always recognize her face in other photos taken within a few seconds or minutes of one another. It simply is not consistent in its facial recognition. I can understand why it may have difficulty recognizing similarities in her face in photos taken when she was 3 years-old with ones taken recently at 11. I think that it accurately recognized her face in less than 50% of all the images I have of her in my library. The same goes for the faces of myself and other members of my family.
I try to keep my iPhoto library fairly well managed using keywords, albums and events. Unfortunately, Faces probably won't be the primary management tool that I and others thought it would be. After spending a few hours selecting, naming, and confirming existing photos in my library, I imported a few photos of myself that were not already in the library. Faces failed to make the recognition, even though the photos are very clear and well composed portraits of myself. There are about dozen other photos of myself in my library that Faces still hasn't yet recognized on its own. I have to select those photos and go through the naming process just as I do using keywords.
The sample photo below clearly shows the faces of my sister-in-law and my daughter. Well, even after helping Faces recognize and name at least 90% of their photos in the library, the tool fails to recognize their faces in a simple shot like this.
And of course, forget about shots in which faces are too small to see. For example, I have photos taken of my children playing in the snow in Reno where the pictures include them and the surroundings. Well, there's no way for Faces to work effectively in these type of pictures. Photos in which faces are obscured by sunglasses or turned sideways are typically not going to be recognized by Faces. So you still need to keyword those photos if you care about managing and identifying the content of all your saved images.
Basically, Faces is a hit and miss tool. It doesn't appear that it that it can be counted on to replace the other management tools in iPhoto. For my workflow, I will stick with manually applying keywords to my images to effectively manage my iPhoto library.
I look forward to hearing about how the tool works for you.
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The iPhoto Flickr uploader is crap! It doesn’t let you choose the dimensions of your upload, wants to create a new set, doesn’t let you select individual photos, and doesn’t let you customize the tags.
“2) It sometimes thinks some objects that aren’t faces are, such as this one of a butt!”
I think maybe it’s smarter than you realize!
“wants to create a new set, doesn’t let you select individual photos”
I’m sorry, what? You can’t upload individual photos? And you can’t create a new set? Okay, that’s officially useless.
If you have a Flickr Pro account, it’s no problem because you can have as many sets as you like. However…
Interestingly, no… pathetically, if you don’t have a pro account, it seems you can’t add photos to an exisiting Flickr set, *EVEN* if it was iPhoto that created the set originally. Therefore, let’s say you create an album in iPhoto called “My Dog” and upload it to Flickr. Next week you have some more doggie pics you’ve dropped into that album. When you click to send to Flickr, you’d hope it would synchronize and add any new pics to that set on Flickr.
Nope. If you have already used your three free sets, it will tell you you can’t create a new set.
I can only assume from that it always wants to create a new set. Which would mean your new doggie pics would have to go in a new set - and would probably mean all the old ones would be uploaded too, thus duplicating them on Flickr.
Of course, most of this is conjecture. Anyone with a Pro account able to test this?
I have a Flickr Pro account, but no iLife 09 yet. I’ll let you know as soon as I get it.
Okay, here are my impressions and notes based on what I’ve used so far.
You can upload individual pics. The problem now is that you wouldn’t want to because, as you noted, you can’t add photos to existing sets. Even if photos come from the same event, it creates a NEW set every time with the same name.
It’s a somewhat limited use for me with Flickr. Not as good as Flickr Uploadr but built-in, which is pretty good.
It’s basically useless for me with Facebook since you can’t upload to an existing album. I don’t use Facebook that way, so I won’t be using it for that.
Faces is okay but very, very limited. I like the Faces board, but otherwise it is far from automatic. It’s about 80% on even recognizing that there’s a face in the photo at all. My experience seems to be about 5% or less for actually putting the right name with the face.
Sadly, although we know Apple will improve both Faces and the Flickr uploader, they will make us wait until iLfe ‘10.
I felt rather insulted the first time I ran iLife ‘09 coz it asked me to register so I could be notified of updates. Assholes.
iLife apps jus don’t get enough incremental upgrades with w real feature improvements, not jsut bug fixes and tweaks. iMovie ‘08 got a decent one, but it HAD to.
So come on Apple, fix the Flickr uploader now, not in 12 months.
Not being to upload to existing sets is a pretty stupid oversight. Maybe it’s there in preferences or something and we’re missing it? It just seems ridiculous for them to have overlooked this extremely basic feature. Kind of like leaving cut & paste out of…oh…nevermind.
Bakari, or anyone, has iPhoto 09 gone semi-non-destructive editing? or did I mis this in iPhoto 08?
Coz I’ve only just discovered that crops, color etc changes are remembered and can be undone. And retouches can’t, but are applied every time you open the image. I over did it on one image and now it crashes iPhoto everytime I access it.
I have an interesting observation with the faces detection. I have a photograph I took for my wife’s passport, which is the same face repeated six times on the same image (two columns of three rows). With that image, Faces correctly found each of the six faces, but then offered a different name for each! That’s bizarre and indicates that the algorithm Apple are using obviously has something quite odd in it. That aside, I found the recognition got worse and worse the more images I used. For small libraries with a few faces the problem is fairly simple - but as it “learns” more and more examples of the face I suspect it becomes so generic as to be useless. And as others have said, forget it if the person is wearing sun glasses.
Overall, nice idea but mediocre implementation. I ended up spending several hours of manually tagging to label all my photos.
I worry you’re right about it gettong worse, Paul.
Its biggest prob tho, as i see it, is it’s no substitute for keyword tagging photos with names. Simply because you can’t name a person whose face is obscured or distorted as that would degrade the integrity of the identification for that person.
For example, someone wearing sunglasses, masks or helmets with masks or grills, hands or objects in front of faces, faces side on etc.
So you can’t use it to build a library of all images of a person, only a library of pictures where their face is clearly shown.
Therefore if you want to make a slideshow of a person then, if it’s based only on face recognition, it’s going to miss out a lot of great photos of the person such as playing sport, outside on a sunny day etc. In fact the slideshow may start to look a little boring by lacking that variety.
So really, you may as well just use keywords, because it’s probably faster and is more thorough.
Getting back to Paul’s point, I suspect this is why iphoto gets worse at identifying people. That is because we are naming faces that aren’t perfect enough, e.g. angled or obscured etc.
And i think in real life that’s what happened to me. I have found it excellent at identifying me even though i wear glasses, but it’s terrible at identifying my wife. And i reckon that’s because the very first photo i named as having her face, she was wearing sunglasses! So i suspect ever since it thinks she has giant black alien eyes, and hence can’t identify her.
In the end, I think faces is one of those eye-candy features Apple likes so much, because it looks and sounds great but ends up not being overly useful.
Mine recognized a jar of pickles in the photo as a face. Thumbs up!
In all fairness, though, I’ve found that the Confirm Faces feature actually works pretty well. It hits more than it misses in that case. That’s when you double-click a face on the bulletin board and it shows you a bunch of photos that might be that person.
You’re right about the Confirm Faces features, Beeb. It does seem to do okay there.
Of particular interest though is it is identifying my children at different ages, even as babies.
Faces worked really well for me, spotting most of the faces correctly in my 10,000+ photos.
I was very impressed by how quickly it identified a person once I had given it a few reference faces to start with. It also did very well with people of all ages, picking me out as a child and as a 48 years old, outstanding!
One surprising oversight by Apple is you can’t create Smart Albums based on faces.