iPhoto '09 uses face detection package from Omron

There is a program for transfers contact-information from Apple Adress Book into Faces, check it out, it works like a charm and saves a lot of time!

http://prosopagnosia.dessibelle.se/

Plus, it's got a wicked name ;)
Cheers!

I like the faces feature a lot. And I also have some suggestions as to future updates. For example, I would like a pop-up menu in the confirmation section, where you can pick who a person really is (double clicking for "no" and then picking the real name).

I'm surprised how well it works. I have never even attempted to try to type in or change the keywords for photos of my family because it way too time consuming.

This app will (and already has) saved me hours of time! So what if it's not perfect??

I have over 15,000 photos in my iPhoto library, and the app recognized faces in well over 90% of photos with people in it.

It may well not be perfect, but what do people expect in something that is EXTREMELY new and VERY useful!

More app developers should take risks like Apple does, to try to advance software functionality for the future!

The same thing goes with Voice Recognition. It can be very useful to a small number of people, but is a very hard technical challenge.

Facial recognition is something more people can use, and putting up with a bit of effort is worth it if it saves dozens of hours of time!

@ Gazoobee I understand why it messes up the AI. I was sort of hoping it used some sort of weighted average to filter out some of the odd balls (I only really tagged some of me that had my face in profile, none that didn't show my face at all). My point was that I'd like Apple to add the ability to tag a person to a photo without their face being in it so that the data isn't used for suggestions. The solution for now is to just add a tag of their name.

Expecting face recognition software to be highly accurate in an infinite variety of environments from photos taken by thousands of people and hundreds of different cameras is asking an awful lot. Where iPhoto picked out patterns that looked like faces, they did to me as well. Where it mistook my family members for one another I was impressed... it recognized the similarities.

The sooner you learn to take better pictures and not be disappointed when it confuses your girlfriend with an ostrich the sooner you begin to appreciate this new technology, especially at the price you paid for it.

i have a much better understanding of the software now. than you GHOST.

it showed up with rocks, hands and other stuff when it was looking up my sons face. i was a bit disappointed because i have like 30k pictures where maybe 1/3 are with faces. i am working already for at least 6 hours on this.

I'm surprised that it doesn't work better than it does. If I have an event, with 10 photos, and 8 of the photos I've tagged have me and one other person, the odds of the last two photos having us is greater. Especially if the photos were taken with the same camera, within a few minutes of each other. iPhoto doesn't seem to make any connection at all with regards to criteria such as 'event', and date/time of the photo.

I had a series of Christmas photos of my family, all posed in front of the tree. For 8 photos, all taken within 10 mins of each other, it guessed everyone (5 people) correctly except for one person. for that person, it suggested a completely different person, incorrectly, EVERY TIME despite the fact that I kept correcting it.

I tried it for a ton of photos and it was great at recognizing me at first but got worse over time and started confusing all of my pics with my brother or dad. I like the idea of it but it does need a bit of work.

I've been playing with the face recognition feature for a couple days now and have run into a problem. I've tagged the photos much like I would in Facebook. Sometimes someone is in a photo but their face is turned from camera (either partially or completely to the back of their head). They are still in the photo and I'd like to mark it as such. It first became apparent in photos of me. The more photos that weren’t really my face I would tag, the less accurate the photo detection would become until, at this point, it recognizes no photos of me (and there are still plenty to be tagged). The majority of the photos of me that I’ve tagged are good ones of my face (including large headshot style photos). I feel that I’ll now have to go and untag some photos to get the engine working again but I wish there was an option to tell it that it’s me but not my face. Has anyone else run into this problem?

Also, one other gripe… why the hell didn’t they integrate Faces with Address Book. When I type in someone’s name, it should begin suggesting people from my address book. It should then automatically pull in their email address for Facebook syncing. And really, they should pull info from Facebook too in the suggestions (but I’d rather have a broader Facebook integration with Address Book in Snow Leopard). I was hoping for full integration so that I’d be presented choices from iPhoto when selecting contact photos but I’d just settle for iChat style suggestions. C’mon, Apple.