iPhoto '09 and the Language of Faces

Apple's "iLife '09" should really just be called "Apple Faces" instead. I ordered the latest version of Apple's media management suite, iLife '09, right after Phil Schiller announced it at Macworld SF earlier this month largely thanks to Phil's demo of the new iPhoto 8.0. I have been using iPhoto since Apple first released it, enjoying its convenience and its growth with every annual upgrade.

For quite some time I made a habit of importing every photo I shot into iPhoto and tagging each one with iPhoto keywords, first using iPhoto's built in keyword tagging system and then upgrading to a series of plugins the latest of which, Bullstorm's Keyword Manager, made the chore much easier if not enjoyable. Why did I go through the painstaking process of identifying every person in every photo and every location where those pictures were shot? At first I told myself that I tagged for easy access to find people when I needed a picture of someone. Eventually I came to ask how often do I really NEED a picture of a particular person? Is it worth all that tagging effort? Plus I had started seeing a few search sites pop up that included face detection technology and I had a good feeling that eventually that's where Apple would go with iPhoto. So I stopped tagging in iPhoto.

I took to using Pixelpipe's uploading tool to send my photos to a bunch of websites including Fotki, Flickr, Friendster and Facebook. I used to be very concerned that my upload method could embed iPhoto keywords into the uploaded files for Fotki and Flickr to use as tags, but we're living in a Facebook world these days and Facebook doesn't use photo keyword. Instead you could use a Facebook specific iPhoto plugin and identify your contacts in the uploader before you uploaded. Cool. When I heard Phil talk about the Facebook integration with the new iPhoto I couldn't wait to play with it. Unfortunately I can't seem to get the Facebook integration to work, not sure why - it says it is uploading but nothing shows up in my Facebook account. I'll keep working on that.

What does work is face detection. I am mesmerized by iPhoto's ability to identify and zoom in on people's faces. In the Faces section you can view your photos in one of two View modes Thumbnail or Faces. In the Faces View Mode iPhoto automatically detects the face of the person in question and zooms in on it.

I am particularly taken with scrolling through a person's Faces screen and watching how they've changed over the years. This works especially well with children as you can literally watch them grow before your eyes. I am so surprised that Apple has not made more of this capability and enabled you to make movies or Keepsakes, as they now call books, cards and calendars, using this new Faces View of each photo. Hopefully Apple will either expand this functionality in the next version of iPhoto and will work with plugin developers to allow for the use of this Face View for exporting.

This face detection aspect of the technology alone makes it entertaining enough to actually sit and deal with the face recognition feature which at this point is really just so-so. I've only spent a few hours training the program to recognize my friends and family and it seems to be right as often as it is wrong - which isn't necessarily bad. That's 50% of the identification work done for me - not too shabby.

The 50% incorrect choices are sometimes way off but there has to be some kind of similarities in the images that the system is seeing and that in and of itself is a fascinating aspect of the process. iPhoto highlights how much my niece and nephew looked alike as babies and when it mistook some of my friends for other people I started to see similarities that I never noticed before. There's a language of faces that we know innately but not consciously and iPhoto now speaks that language, in some ways better than we do, and in others not so well. Expressions, for example through the program for a loop, whereas a big smile just reinforces a face for a human observer. In another life I'll have to read up more on this field of study but for the meantime I will enjoy dabbling with iPhoto.

In the end I come back to the same question: When am I really going to go looking for a photo of a specific person? And more importantly, without a real online synchronization of this information how valuable is it for me in the long run? Hopefully I will work out the Facebook integration kink in my system and this second question will play itself out more clearly. I'm still happy with my purchase and will write up more as iPhoto and I learn more about the faces in my world.