Faces on iPhoto 09
IPhoto 09 has a new feature called Faces that aims in putting some facial recognition into your photo organization software. It scans your photo library and makes a note of all faces within a picture. Then once it’s done, you go through and start assigning names to faces. You can manually do the name entry one photo at a time. Some of the matches are hilarious
After you accumulate a few names and faces, then you can do it by individual faces in a batch mode. IPhoto will list out pictures which match the person. You accept or reject the set of photos. It learns faces and tries to match more and more of the unknown to the name. It’s gets kind of fun.
You see some of the matching going on when it asks if the name matches the face. This gets interesting as people age. Will it recognize by major facial features the same person as he or she ages?
Once you get a bunch of faces in your Faces portion, then the fun begins as you can look at each persons set of pictures and see them age before your eyes. It’s rather poignant.
I like this feature. One thing though, it needs access to AddressBook so that you don’t have to type in all the names.
Here’s a two examples:
