iPhoto's Faces
25 Nov
I just recently upgraded to the latest version of Apple’s OS, which also got me the latest version of their iPhoto software. Today I had a chance to play around with it a bit. There are a ton of new features, but one of my favorites is called “Faces.” According to Apple, “iPhoto uses face detection to identify faces of people in your photos and face recognition to match faces that look like the same person. That makes it easy for you to add names to your photos. And it helps you find the people you’re looking for. Clicking the Faces view shows you a corkboard featuring a snapshot for each person you’ve named. iPhoto suggests a set of possible matches you can confirm with a click.”
I found this tool to be very helpful in quickly locating lots of photos that include a particular person. Of course it’s not perfect, and it makes mistakes fairly often. But, you can “teach” iPhoto by confirming and denying whether each face is the person in question. A particularly fun use of this feature is in identifying who, among your family members, you look like. For example, when I looked for all the photos of me, I was frequently presented with photos of my daughter and my niece.
Double-clicking on those images tells iPhoto the face is not mine, while a single-click confirms the face is mine.
When I ran the tool using one of my daughter’s face, it was fun to see who in the family iPhoto thinks she looks like. In particular, it repeatedly asked me if photos of my husband’s nephew and my niece were in fact my daughter. With my other daughter, iPhoto seems to think she looks a lot like my husband, which many people indeed tell us.
If you have an older version of iPhoto, I encourage you to upgrade and check out “Faces” and the many other new features included.
