Apple iPhoto ‘09: Funny Faces

By William Van Winkle, published on October 5, 2009
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: , , | Themes: Software

5. Apple iPhoto ‘09: Funny Faces

There were many instances when iPhoto failed to tag a face or else incorrectly tagged an object as a face. For example, iPhoto tagged hands, arms, ears, and various other objects. In this image, you can see that iPhoto tagged the car wheel but not the boy’s face.

I had to mouse-over these boxes and click the X symbol in their top-left corner to delete the tags. In the case of missing tags, you click the Add Missing Face button, which plants a face box in the center of the image. Simply drag and resize it to wherever you need, add a name in the name field, and move on. If the name is new, that face will show up on the corkboard.

  

All told, it took me 37 minutes to go from importing my 300 images to putting the last tag onto my fourth test subject. When I was done, I had a complete set of tags for all four people. There were no omissions. All accidental mistaggings had been edited. But I had done most of the work myself. Apple's recognition engine was useful to kick things off, but I’d say that I had to do well over 50% of the name inputting manually, and perhaps one-quarter of the face tags/boxes were manually created.

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Comments

liemfukliang 10/06/2009 5:29 AM
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Please update more on:
1. let just say I have spend weekly time on a low end pc to get 33 GB photo with so many file. How do I save this tag when I am reinstall windows?
2. About the portabilty in no 1. Picasa has picasa.ini in every folder, but when it corrupt, the picasa.ini is not helpful recovering the weekly time spent.
3. Speed? Why there is no benchmark graph like usual?
4. Try gradiation photos or something similiar. It will see about the acuration.
5. I want to get the best speed, what is the most needed hardware. If Processor will I7 better than C2D? If GPU, will Geforce GTX 295 better than 9800?

I have private paint experience using picasa. I have taging many face in a week of Sempron 2800+ OC to 2 Ghz. When the face recognation is done, for what ever reason, my cpu is dead (dead power electricity). When the electricity power is up, my pc is on windows. The picasa is corrupt. My one week OC is for nothing. DAMN :((.

deadlockedworld 10/06/2009 9:23 AM
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I recently tagged all my photos with Picasa. I think i personally tagged more than the software did--the software is VERY cautious. It also repeatedly asked to tag posters, even paintings that were on my walls. Finally, it doesn't do well with babies--which is no surprise because they all look the same to me too :-)

Its cool, but im not sure the outcome was worth sitting there tagging hundreds of pictures of ex-girlfriends.

testerie 10/06/2009 11:37 AM
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I am giving comment for testing.

Tomsguiderachel 10/06/2009 6:41 PM
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Deadlockedworld--you don't have to tag everyone in every album in Picasa--just don't tag albums that have your exes in them. I definitely don't tag everyone in my photos--only those people that are important to me.

Anonymous 10/06/2009 8:48 PM
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Adobe's Photoshop Elements 7 has the ability to detect faces but not automatically match them. It did make tagging much quicker. I could select 40 pictures from a party and tag the lot all at once.

However, I found that there were several pictures that it didn't catch. So, I ended up having to go through the whole bunch manually anyway to catch the stragglers. I found I spent as much time, if not more, making sure I got everything. So, I'm not sure that the "helpful tool" actually did much.

Anonymous 10/07/2009 11:29 AM
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I am using iPhoto '09 and I found that the predictive tagging is getting less and less accurate as the database of tagged faces increases. Impression confirmed by one of my friends using the same app. For example, my wife is probably the most frequent face in my collection and the software has a hard time identifying her. On the other hand, I tagged the face of a friend I see rarely and I was welcomed with 4-5 good matches.

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