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Demonhood · Jan 28, 2009, 11:53 PM

Anyone having fun with this feature yet?
Accurate? Hilariously matched up photos of you with a tree trunk? Etc.

Mine still has 326 minutes left to go. I guess analyzing 20,000 photos takes some time.

HenryMelton · Jan 29, 2009, 12:09 AM

I was a little disappointed. I had to interrupt the initial processing, so when it had missed many obvious faces I started supplying the face square myself and then lost confidence that I was doing it correctly. I opened up the photo library package and remove both of the 'face' files and it happily started looking for them again. I only have about 1800 photos so it's not too much trouble to get most things straightened out. I'm taking it slowly and I'm happy with the final results.

gperks · Jan 29, 2009, 12:53 AM

Some nice surprises, a few odd matches. Matched my kids at all sorts of ages. A bit of training and it starts finding people in all sorts of photos.

Places, pretty awesome. Wish you could move the pin for a photo (overriding the location), but otherwise very cool. Oh how I wish all my photos were GPS located. I know I won't be the only one wishing that :-)

Spheric Harlot · 04:05 AM

Face recognition in iPhoto is inaccurate enough (though it gets better) to still require me to go through each and every one of my 8000 photos and help it along.

The number of faces it doesn't even recognize as faces at all is large enough for the automation to be almost useless.

In addition, there is NO WAY TO USE FACES AS CRITERIA FOR SMART ALBUMS!!!! What idiocy.

IOW, I can't even automate checking whether faces have been tagged (by creating a smart album of, say, "album is Andreas AND people on photograph does not include Andreas").

Huge bummer and a MONSTROUS waste of time.
(Edit: I was wrong - it works, but the criterion is not "Face", but "Name". Thanks, HenryMelton!)

Also, no way to group faces - say, as "work" or "family". If you have several group project photos (i.e. bands in my case), and work photos, and family, all in your iPhoto library, you're looking at dozens and dozens of faces - it'd be nice to have them sorted by group or so.

All in all, I have some serious gripes about this feature, but I'm actually quite happy it's there - it's sure to get a lot better with time.

Urkel · 11:43 AM

Okay, after several grueling hours of Face tagging with iPhoto then I can sum up the experience in one sentence:

"It's good enough to be impressed with, but not good enough to be relied on."

Face recognition is one of the most exciting things in photo management, but even at an impressive 60-70% accuracy then you're still stuck with 30-40% missed or mislabeled tags. And in my 20k photo library that means days and days of telling the software "No, Cousin Jeff is the ugliest guy in the family doesn't look anything like me" or "Hey, that's a horse!". Then when you think you finally finished tagging, the refresh search pulls up another 400 pictures to de-label.

Don't get me wrong, I think the feature is great. But it just demands too much input from the end user so it's not going to be a seamless addition to your workflow. (But the results are definitely cool when mixed with those great new slideshows. Why aren't those offered as screensavers?)

HenryMelton · Jan 29, 2009, 07:58 PM

You can use faces for smart albums. I just tested it with "Name ends with Melton" and pulled up a family album containing everyone whose last name is Melton.

Spheric Harlot · Jan 30, 2009, 04:03 AM

Originally Posted by HenryMelton

You can use faces for smart albums. I just tested it with "Name ends with Melton" and pulled up a family album containing everyone whose last name is Melton.

EGADS!

You're right!

Thanks!

:grumblegrumbleblindoldmanatworkgrumblegrumble:

Demonhood · Jan 30, 2009, 03:01 PM

thoughts so far:

finding faces is intolerably slow on my G5 tower (i know, what do i expect with 20K pix on a PPC). but it only happens once, so it's tolerable. finding suggestions, however, still takes a very long time. and there's no indication of which person it is currently working on.

the accuracy with a small sample is poor, but hilarious. anyone with facial hair, a hat, glasses, curly hair, etc. is automatically assigned to someone else with that feature. the more you teach it, the better it gets (and rather quickly i've found).

exported pictures DO NOT retain the face data. not as unique metadata, not as exif keywords, not at all. i imagine Apple will include this as an option shortly, but i'll be writing them to request it, just in case.

Urkel · Jan 30, 2009, 03:24 PM

Originally Posted by Demonhood

thoughts so far:

finding faces is intolerably slow on my G5 tower (i know, what do i expect with 20K pix on a PPC). but it only happens once, so it's tolerable. finding suggestions, however, still takes a very long time. and there's no indication of which person it is currently working on.

I have a brand new MBP w/4GB and my 20k library is intolerably slow. As a lightroom user that's made a brand new duplicate library of my photos simply to use Faces/Places then I have no idea how people put up with iPhoto's performance.

Anyway, here's my list of problems and things I hope they fix (in and UPDATE and not iPhoto '10):

1) Running out of Suggestions:
This shouldn't even be possible, but after a few days of taking turns in tagging then we've exhausted the suggestion list. That would be nice if we were actually done, but in looking at other people's suggestions or our "Unknown Faces" smart folder then I'm seeing these people everywhere. There should be an intensive refresh I can run overnight or something.

2) Context Menu during Suggestions:
I'll do a search for my nephew and half the pictures are of his brothers. Instead of just saying "Not Billy", I should have an option to say "Not Billy, It's Jimmy". It's frustrating because many times those photos never show up again which means I have to hunt them down when they could have easily been catagorized earlier.

3) S-L-O-W:
This is a brand new system with a fresh library of photos and it seems like the more work I do the slower the software gets. I've switched to the 9600 chip, closed all apps, reboot several times and it still is moving to the point of being unusable. Picasa seems to handle the iPhoto library just fine though.

4) Accuracy:
Even with intensive training I'm still around 70% accuracy. It feels great to see those first few rows of suggestions be accurate, but a lot of the suggestions aren't even close.

Anyway, here's a tip for anyone who needs an easier way to go find unknown faces. My smart album found over 12k photos still, and that's just plain depressing...

Smart Album for Unknown Faces:
Make a "Smart Album" with the following condition: Name - Does Not Contain - [Leave Blank]

HenryMelton · Jan 30, 2009, 03:32 PM

I've found that the most troublesome failure is in the initial face capture. A large number of pictures of me never have the face outline box drawn, as if there is no detectable face. It could be due to my beard, glasses and cap hiding the presence of the face. I read earlier today speculation that the face detection technology was purchased from a Japanese company. Was the data detector trained on too many beardless faces? I would be curious if anyone is seeing the same problem.

turtle777 · Jan 30, 2009, 04:28 PM

I'm very impressed with face recognition.

The key is to only fiddle with a few pics and enter the names manually, and then have iPhoto suggest more matches. As you match masses of new pics, it will constantly refine the suggestions. It's a breeze from there.

I only had a few oddball face outline boxes appear outside of the face area, not many at all.

-t

Demonhood · Jan 30, 2009, 06:11 PM

face recognition has a hard time with diagonal faces. it likes them completely horizontal or vertical. pity.

Spheric Harlot · Jan 30, 2009, 08:55 PM

Originally Posted by Urkel

I have a brand new MBP w/4GB and my 20k library is intolerably slow. As a lightroom user that's made a brand new duplicate library of my photos simply to use Faces/Places then I have no idea how people put up with iPhoto's performance.

Yeah. Getting all sorts of weird hangs and glitches - image views not updating, images not removed from smart albums until you leave the album and click on it again...

Originally Posted by Urkel

Anyway, here's a tip for anyone who needs an easier way to go find unknown faces. My smart album found over 12k photos still, and that's just plain depressing...

Smart Album for Unknown Faces:
Make a "Smart Album" with the following condition: Name - Does Not Contain - [Leave Blank]

That's helpful, thanks! - Unfortunately, adding unrecognized faces only works for A SINGLE FACE, as it kicks the photo off the album the second a name is entered (rather than when you're done with the photo).

pixelbaker · Feb 1, 2009, 09:36 PM

Originally Posted by turtle777

I only had a few oddball face outline boxes appear outside of the face area, not many at all.
-t

I've had a little bit of this going on too, but not horrible. After doing some initial entry, it suggested that a fuzzy brown Domo Kun dice hanging from my rear-view mirror might be my friend Luis. That gave me a good chuckle.

AppleGirl1990 · Feb 2, 2009, 12:14 AM

100% agree. When you select "Not Jimmy" you should be able to say "But this is James" instead.
Since that feature is not available yet, i have to hunt down those photo's. Often i can't find them in my 10K photos.

Also, very slow!

Demonhood · Feb 2, 2009, 08:03 PM

i'm a bit addicted to tagging/refining this face stuff.

altho i'd be much happier if it wasn't at the speed of molasses.

once Apple adds the face data to the exif, i hope they enable the ability to tag faces on shared albums. because i don't always know all the names of the people in these photos.

Urkel · Feb 2, 2009, 11:04 PM

At this point our brand new Macbook Pro feels like it's an iBook with 64MB RAM. What is going on with iPhoto that it is this slow??? I've been nagging my wife to stop face-tagging but the whole process is addicting (and I'm guilty of it too). You hope to finish a photo and suddenly it finds someone new so you tag him and then spend the next hour sifting through suggestions. It definitely is cool, but the software needs to be optimized badly.

BTW, we have twins in our family and (maybe it's wishful thinking or just basic math) it seems to be getting better at figuring out who is who.

rickey939 · Feb 2, 2009, 11:17 PM

I'm enjoying the new iPhoto!

AppleGirl1990 · Feb 3, 2009, 12:04 AM

I enjoy it too. But it's slow and makes my speedy machine crawl.
Reminds me of the Early OS X. Bloated and slow.

MindFad · Feb 3, 2009, 04:57 AM

I heard it was slow.

badidea · Feb 3, 2009, 05:07 AM

Originally Posted by Demonhood

Hilariously matched up photos of you with a tree trunk? Etc.

Yes, that's exactly what happened!

...and hands are recognized as faces...
...and a bush...

The really bad thing was though, that when my girlfriend wanted to see her album, it also contained quite a few of my ex-girlfriends...

OreoCookie · Feb 3, 2009, 05:11 AM

I hope that feature makes it into Aperture soon enough.

Demonhood · Feb 3, 2009, 12:32 PM

Originally Posted by badidea

Yes, that's exactly what happened!

...and hands are recognized as faces...
...and a bush...

...and folds in clothing...
...and twigs on the ground...
...and leaves on a tree...
...and a huge cluster of monarch butterflies...

Originally Posted by badidea

The really bad thing was though, that when my girlfriend wanted to see her album, it also contained quite a few of my ex-girlfriends...

mine did the exact same thing. altho, after tagging 100 shots of her, the recognition rate went to around 95%. it seems to go like this:

# of tagged shots : accuracy
1-10 : terrible. only look for suggestions for the humor
11-30 : much better. probably around 50%
31-80 : accuracy at 70%
81+ : excellent

of course, this doesn't take into account iPhotos need to put people with glasses together. or people that smile the same way. or people with curly hair. or the fact that it can be slightly racist in those early stages.

took me awhile to figure out that you need to actually stay on a Faces page for a particular individual for it to start suggestion pix. i had assumed it would simply do it in the background (which it does to a much less extent).

Urkel · Feb 3, 2009, 04:08 PM

Originally Posted by OreoCookie

I hope that feature makes it into Aperture soon enough.

That would be nice, but they have a long way to go before they can call this a "pro" feature. Even at 80% accuracy, when you're dealing with an Aperture library of 100,000 then you're missing an awful lot of photos.

What I really want is some sort of face-tagging standard so it gets embedded in the EXIF.

Spheric Harlot · 04:31 PM

Originally Posted by Demonhood

mine did the exact same thing. altho, after tagging 100 shots of her, the recognition rate went to around 95%. it seems to go like this:

# of tagged shots : accuracy
1-10 : terrible. only look for suggestions for the humor
11-30 : much better. probably around 50%

For me, the next step was 30+ : no further matches found.

Another really interesting thing is that a portrait shot of my brother HAS BEEN TAGGED with his name, and it's STILL suggested for every single Faces gallery.

wtf?

joec · Feb 3, 2009, 04:33 PM

Just started using it, quick summary is:

- Detect human faces in the picture is fine
- Detect individuals is not. It tags my fiancee's pictures correctly but also identify a lot of her pictures as my sister!
- Does not detect pets even after tagging some examples.

turtle777 · Feb 3, 2009, 04:56 PM

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot

Another really interesting thing is that a portrait shot of my brother HAS BEEN TAGGED with his name, and it's STILL suggested for every single Faces gallery.

Maybe your brother is an impostor

-t

Demonhood · Feb 4, 2009, 01:29 AM

iPhoto 09 - uncovering evil doppelgangers one face at a time.

badidea · Feb 4, 2009, 10:05 AM

Does it make a difference if the first picture you tag with a name is actually a very bad "example" for that person, even though you tag a few more good shots afterwards?
The first picture of my girl-friend that I tagged was a side shot with glasses.
Of course now iPhoto thinks that every other human being (and tree) with glasses is her, even though I gave it another 10 perfectly good portrait examples without glasses!
Furthermore the terrible glasses shot is now her gallery picture on the face page and I have no idea how to change that!

Demonhood · Feb 4, 2009, 01:13 PM

scrub over her section on the Faces page and hit the space bar when you get to a picture you want to use.

oh, and remember that, in the "Confirm Name" mode, you can simply click and drag over pictures to select them. and option-clicking (or option dragging) to reject them.

as for the first picture thing, i don't think that's how it works. i even had to draw a frame around one or two people for their first shot, and iPhoto still eventually learns what they look like.

Demonhood · Feb 4, 2009, 08:39 PM

just sent this into apple's feedback:

UI changes
---

-Badges on the Faces screen to show which people have new suggested faces and how many of them there are.
-The ability to choose more than just 'Not Bob' or 'Bob'. A dropdown menu that says 'Not Bob, but it is ...' and then a list of all the known faces.
-Changing the default scrub order to chronological. I'm not sure how it is sorted right now, but chronologically makes the most sense. Also, it's fun going left to right and watching someone get older.

Enhancements
---

-Selecting faces that are diagonal.
-Choosing whether or not iPhoto does background searches for face matches. This is very processor intensive and it'd be handy to be able to disable it (or focus it).
-Speed. While I sort of expect it to be dirt slow on my DP G5 with 25,000 pictures, I have reports (on the MacNN forums) that it is just as slow for people using the newest equipment available.
-Face tagging for shared photos. While this would require my previously requested ability to export face data (even as an exif keyword), it would be invaluable to my work.

badidea · Feb 5, 2009, 05:08 AM

Originally Posted by Demonhood

just sent this into apple's feedback:

UI changes
---

-Badges on the Faces screen to show which people have new suggested faces and how many of them there are.
-The ability to choose more than just 'Not Bob' or 'Bob'. A dropdown menu that says 'Not Bob, but it is ...' and then a list of all the known faces.
-Changing the default scrub order to chronological. I'm not sure how it is sorted right now, but chronologically makes the most sense. Also, it's fun going left to right and watching someone get older.

I like that - great feedback!

AppleGirl1990 · Feb 6, 2009, 08:52 AM

Great Feedback. I hope they implement those changes in a a quick fix upgrade, rather than making us wait for iLife10

AppleGirl1990 · Feb 16, 2009, 11:23 AM

A friend of mine just installed iPhoto 09 on a G5 tower and FACES took 10 hours to analyze.
Jesus C!

turtle777 · Feb 16, 2009, 11:28 AM

Originally Posted by AppleGirl1990

A friend of mine just installed iPhoto 09 on a G5 tower and FACES took 10 hours to analyze.
Jesus C!

I'm sorry, but that's an absolutely useless statement.

It's like saying "It took me 2 days to get to Bombay", w/o giving specifics on the place of departure and mode of transportation.

-t

Spheric Harlot · Feb 16, 2009, 03:03 PM

Originally Posted by AppleGirl1990

A friend of mine just installed iPhoto 09 on a G5 tower and FACES took 10 hours to analyze.
Jesus C!

He has an archive of over 50,000 photos.

Jesus C!

AppleGirl1990 · Feb 19, 2009, 08:15 AM

Only 30,000 photos needed to be analyzed.

Spheric Harlot · Feb 19, 2009, 02:08 PM

Ah. Only.

Well, that, um... means I was pretty much on the mark with my sarcastic comment, and I'll leave it at that.

AppleGirl1990 · Feb 20, 2009, 08:27 AM

You think 30,000 is too many?
Regardless of the number, my original point was that the iPhoto 09 application has a turtleesk feel to it when launching Faces.

Demonhood · Feb 20, 2009, 08:09 PM

i'm curious to see how big people's face databases are. at work:

unique faces - 134
tagged photos - 1223
total photos - 25,000

face_blob.db - 60.4MB
face.db - 34.5MB

these files are contained in the iPhoto Library package, btw.

Spheric Harlot · Feb 20, 2009, 11:42 PM

Originally Posted by AppleGirl1990

You think 30,000 is too many?

No, I think you entirely underestimate just how complex this face recognition thing is.

AppleGirl1990 · Feb 21, 2009, 09:49 AM

unique faces - 173
tagged photos - 4,223
total photos - 8,499

Demonhood · Mar 31, 2009, 01:10 AM

the iPhoto update adds a few niceties:

-autocomplete for people in your address book
-no need for that additional click when you're adding a missing face

but it is still missing so very much. and there seem to be fewer suggestions (altho more accurate), but that might just be me.

Spheric Harlot · Mar 31, 2009, 01:36 AM

It also seems *much* snappier now when adding faces (MacBook late 2006).

harbinger75 · Mar 31, 2009, 11:57 AM

My wife and I have had really good luck with the iPhoto Face Recognition process. After "teaching" it several Events worth of people, it seems to get it right a great deal of the time. So, either iPhoto is super-smart, or my family and friends just have very easily recognizable faces in all our photos.