Faces, The New Way To Waste Time
When iLife ’08 came out, I spent countless hours obsessively organizing my photos into events in iPhoto. Why? Because Apple let me and I felt compelled to take advantage of a feature that I honestly haven’t used much since. Last week, I finally got around to installing iLife ’09, and today when I fired up iPhoto, I smiled as Places and Faces diligently searched my iPhoto Library finding new ways to help me sort my photos. Places is pretty straight-forward, it just checks the meta-data of your photos for locations and maps them for you.
Since I’ve been using my iPhone to import photos for the past year, it was able to map quite a bit of my adventures. Pretty neat feature! Faces, on the other hand, re-triggered my somewhat-dormant OCD and I found myself lost playing it’s never-ending matching game of who’s-who in my life.
I have a lot of photos. I have a lot of photos of people. I have a lot of photos of the same people. Faces goes through your iPhoto library and identifies what it thinks are people’s faces. Then it relies on your will and dedication to go through and tell it who those people are. For example, I have a lot of pictures of my friend Greg. I found a few photos of him and labeled those faces with Greg’s name. Then, my Faces tab showed me a pile of other pictures that it thought might be Greg. Some were, some weren’t.
After approving the photos that were him it then showed me another batch of related photos that it thought were of him, and I could then approve or deny those. Eventually it gave up. At that point I went back to my library and continued tagging more and more photos with the names of my friends and relatives and then would approve and deny faces recommendations for more photos of them.
For the most part it was a fun time-suck, and I admit I enjoy having the Faces cork-board interface to show me my friends lined up in Polaroid frames. That said, there are certainly some flaws. For instance, it has great difficulty recognizing my friends with beards, and in many instances it wouldn’t even recognize a bearded friend as a “face” (though you can manually add face squares to your pictures). As many have already lamented, it does not recognize pets, so all the endless photos of my cats will continue to go untagged and I will continue to pretend that I’m not really a crazy cat lady.
I also noticed that the more pictures I tagged with the same person’s name, the more it seemed to confuse the feature. For example, I also have quite a few pictures of my friend Sunny. Some are low-lit, well-lit, shot from different angles, and shot over a long enough period of time that her hair changed quite a bit. At first iPhoto was able to identify her in a few other shots, but as I tagged more and more pictures of her, it stopped coming up with suggestions for more of her look-a-likes. I was able to repeat this with other friends and family members who I have varying quality of pictures of.
All-in-all, if you have some time to kill and you really like labeling things then give Faces a try. If nothing else, it’s quite amusing to see what it comes up with for look-a-like suggestions. For example, it not only thinks I look like a few of my former female co-workers, but it also thinks I look like my Dad (sweet until you realize he’s an older partially-balding man with a full beard), one of my best male-friends and several bald men. I’m hoping that Faces doesn’t have magical powers of seeing into my future as a Rogaine representative.