Awhile ago, I upgraded the iPhoto software on the Mac and was anxious to use the ‘Faces’ feature which supposedly is able to scan all your photos in search of a particular face. I never got it working until last week and I must say I’m quite impressed with it.
What you do is select a photo and ask iPhoto to scan for faces. It will then find my face and say “Who is this?” and I type in my name. Then I go back to the Faces dashboard and choose my face and it will say “Here are the confirmed photos of your face. Here are a few others which need confirming.” and they throw out a slew of pictures with me (hopefully) in them.
On the first round, the software may not be able to properly match my face to a picture and would throw up a picture of Eric instead but this is because I’ve only confirmed one photo of myself so it doesn’t have much to work with as a baseline. But as soon as I confirm a half dozen more, it can rescan with all that additional data and find my face in a more refined way.
I was quite impressed in how it ended up working. I scanned for Mike’s face a few times and it even found him in the background of a few shots as well as recognized him in full out zombie makeup from Hallowe’en! Impressive. Most impressive.
All in all, I find this to be a neat feature if you ever want to make a collage of someone you know. Instead of scouring the years upon years of digital photos you have, you can simply scan for the person’s face and spend a good 30 minutes weening out the photos that are not the person you’re searching for, and voila! I say 30 minutes but it depends on the person. Naturally, while scanning for my own face, I will probably spend an hour going through thousands of them. But for a distant relative, you may only have a few pictures of them.
Another neat aspect of it is the fact that they show the pictures chronologically so you can see how you have changed throughout the years. While some people probably won’t like to see this in themselves, I’ve always been intrigued with the capture of time within photographs and I’ve also thought of starting up a photo project where I take the same head shot of myself each day for a year to see the progression.
Of particular note, this feature will probably only be useful to people who use their camera to take pictures of different people. As for Maren who is expecting her first child soon, I highly suspect there will only be one person in all her photographs. 😉