Tagging my photos just got a little bit easier on the Mac

Last week I received my shiny new copy of iLife ’09 in the mail, and I found that the new Faces feature of iPhoto has turned out to be far more interesting than I had imagined based on the reviews.

Once the application had finished searching through my library of thousands of family snapshots, I spent hours discovering long-lost photos with different people in them.

Of the entire iLife suite, I use only iPhoto and iMovie, with the latter only used a few times a year. (Regular iMovie users will be pleased to note that this is the release that takes the suck out of iMovie ’08).

Two new features in iPhoto ’09 stand out among all the rest: Faces and Places. I’m going to talk about Faces.

It’s all about Tagging

Both of these features do what keywords and tagging had been used for up until now. Faces searches for human faces in photos and tries to identify them, based on your other photos, and Places uses location info that your camera hopefully codes in the photographs in order to tag the photos with a location (e.g. Rio de Janeiro).

I am not a big fan of keywords and tagging for two reasons: the Great Tagging Project never gets done, and the tags and keywords are part of the proprietary software, not your photos. Nevertheless, I was overjoyed with how much of the grunt work of tagging was suddenly swept away by the application.

Recognizing Faces

When you launch iPhoto ’09 for the first time (or import a library for the first time), it immediately begins sifting through all of the photos, looking for faces and noting their positions. It’s not perfect, but it does a pretty good job of finding things that look like faces.

Now, when you open a photo, you can click on the Faces icon at the bottom of the window and you will be shown all of the faces that iPhoto found in your photograph.

This is a perfect example of what happens. You can see that I have already gone through several photos, identifying pictures of myself as “Tad”. That’s why iPhoto is asking “Is this Tad?” and I just need to click the checkmark to confirm.

I haven’t identified my friend John in any other photos, so iPhoto simply labels him as “unknown face.” Just click on that field and type “John” and the photo is done.

The next time I encounter a photo with John, it’s pretty likely that iPhoto will identify him.

Finding Similar Photos

But, who wants to go through every single photo in their life identifying people? That’s almost as bad as manually tagging everything.

Now you go to the Faces panel and you will see a nice corkboard background with a single picture for each of your friends and family that you identified. These images represent a whole stack of photos of the same person.

When you click on the stack, it opens up into a screen that shows all of the different photos that have that person.

At the bottom of the list of confirmed photos, iPhoto shows dozens, or even hundreds, of possible matches from elsewhere in your database. For example, when I click on the stack of photos that represents my wife, hundreds of photos come up (as it should be), along hundreds of suggested matches.

Now, I just click the Confirm Name icon at the bottom of the screen and iPhoto shows me a closeup of each face found, and all I have to do is click on the ones that are my wife, or even drag-select many at once.

In this example, the first four possible hits are of her sister, so I double-clicked them to indicate that they are “Not My Wife.” All of the rest are my wife, so I dragged the mouse over them to select them.

Once I click the Save button, each source photo will now have my wife correctly identified within and iPhoto’s face recognition algorithm will learn a little teeny bit more about how to spot my wife.

What a great way to tag thousands of photos in very short order. This is much better than going to each photo by hand and selecting tags for each person like in the old days.

It isn’t perfect

Many reviewers have downplayed Faces, criticizing the sometimes-comical inaccuracy of the tool. It’s pretty darned funny to see the application trying to identify a strange pattern in a bush as a face, or offering dozens of photos of obviously manly dudes as possible matches for my sister-in-law’s delicate features.

But as a very broad brush tool to get you started categorizing photos it is surprisingly useful. I was astonished with how easy it was to very quickly build up lists of photos for close to a hundred people (I would never have imagined that I had that many different people in my library).

As long as your expectations are set right, Faces can take some of the drudgery out of tagging.

The iLife suite comes free with new Macs or can be purchased for $79.

[Update: Added the following info on Picasa]

It’s easy to be overcome by the hooplah around iPhoto and not realize that someone else got there first

Google’s free Picasa tool, available for PC and Mac, also supports facial recognition, though this feature is apparently not available in the local application; it is only available in Picasa Web Albums. The desktop product does sync with web albums.