MacMost Now 215: Using the iPhoto 09 Faces Feature

Check out the new Faces feature of iPhoto 09. You can tag people in your photos quickly with help from iPhoto's facial recognition technology.

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Video Transcript: Hi. This is gary with MacMost Now.
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On this episode on MacMost Now let's take a look at the faces feature in iphoto. some people are having trouble getting started  with the faces feature in iphoto.
When you go ahead and select faces for the first time in iphoto 0.9
you're presented with a screen like this there is nothing set up yet. The way to get started is to go into photos or events and go ahead and select a photo of somebody you know. Here's a photo of myself. now, once you have that you click on the name button at the bottom of the screen. and it will highlight all the faces it thinks it found in the photo, so in this case it found this face right here and it says its an unknown face. I'm going to click on the label there and I'm going to type a name, and hit return. Now, It's gone ahead and added my name as one of the names in Faces and its labeled this first photo with this face as me.
Now when we go to faces we see a little polaroid  picture of me right there. I go ahead and I click on that and it will show me that one picture that it thinks it knows that I'm in. It also shows me some other photos that it thinks it recognizes my face in. What I'll do now is go ahead and click on the confirm name button. and what it'll do is zero in on my face in those photos. I can go ahead and click once to confirm that its me, twice to say that its definitely not me. and third time we just go back and forth and toggle.
So I'll confirm these three photos simply by clicking on them. Now, i've got a lot more than three photos of me in here but its only found these three. So I click done. Now, Its got four photos at the top that it knows are me, but at the bottom, its got even more photos now that it has all this additional data, that it thinks are me as well. So I'll go ahead and hit confirm name again.
Now, I get close ups of my face in all these photos. I click once to confirm. I can keep scrolling through them. So there's eight more that I'm going to confirm. I'll click done. Now it's going to go ahead and I'll have all of the photos, all twelve of them in there, in addition it found three more that it thinks are me. So I'm going to repeat the process again, clicking confirm name, going through here and confirming these three. And you keep doing it until you basically run out of photos that it thinks you're in. There you go, now its identified all of the faces that it thinks are you. All the photos in your entire library.
Now of course there are going to be plenty of times that it gets the face wrong and thinks someone else or another object is your face. You simply say that's definitely not me, and that actually adds more data as well. so the more you do it, the more faces it will find until it finds all the different faces. Now,  then you would go back into the photos identify somebody else in a photo. as a matter-of-fact identify a whole bunch of people. them go back into faces and narrow it down more and eventually, pretty quickly actually, you get to identify all the faces in all of your photos.
It can also take a more direct control, for instance this photo here its identified a face in the crowd, but thats not somebody I know. I'm going to click the x button and that face will go away. In addition, I'm going to add a missing face, and i can go highlight a box around my face,. Probably not a good one to highlight, but it does identify me in this photo, so I'll click done, and as I start typing the name It will recognize I'm typing my name and I can go ahead and click it very easily.
So that's a way you can go and manually add faces or remove faces from individual photos.
Now faces isn't doing anything magical. It's basically just trying to identify things like eyes and noses in pictures to figure out where faces are, then its kinda measuring the distance between eyes and the shape of the face color of the hair, that type of thing. To try to figure out who's who that's why it needs you to confirm everything, and that's why it frequently makes mistakes but its close enough that its so fast for you to be able to label everyone in your photo collection. I've got thousands of photos but I was still able to go ahead and label just about all of the faces of all of the people who are important to me in a very short period of time. I can then use those faces labels for things like searches and smart apps. 
So, check out the new faces feature on iphoto 0.9, Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 215: Using the iPhoto 09 Faces Feature”

J.P.Fritz

16 years ago

You could also mention that while in the Confirm Names mode, if you press the Option key and click and drag across the pictures, you can quickly accept or reject pictures without having to click on individual photos.

Theodor Wyder

15 years ago

face report

Chris

14 years ago

An option to remove all "unnamed" faces from a photo would be nice. That way I could name my kids face in the crowd and remove the rest of the faces to keep them from reappearing in the "could also be in this photo" list.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 215: Using the iPhoto 09 Faces Feature

Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 215: Using the iPhoto 09 Faces Feature”

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