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Face recognition is only for beautiful people, it does not work reliably for ugly.

Don't understand Mossberg's critics. Faces works damn well on my photo library !

I've already had to delete my face database and start again.

It does need work. However, Facebook and Flickr integration is awesome.

Jan 29, 09 - 11:29 am Comment from: Spark

I just installed iLife '09 last night and was checking out the face recognition. Walt describes it pretty well. The feature DOES find most of the images with a specified face, but inexplicably misses some that seem rather obvious. Bottom line is that while you do get a "group" of collected images, you can't have confidence that you've got ALL the images with a particular face. Yet, even with its imperfection, it remains a step forward, so I can still recommend it.

Jan 29, 09 - 11:36 am Comment from: Demon

Gruff haggard old grizzle face like Mossberg's I'm surprised iPhoto didn't toss up an error message that said too old and ugly, please, shave ass and learn to walk backwards on hands.

Beards, mustaches and face piercing (nose, lip, eye brow etc) all cause iPhoto's Face recognition to have a hard time and seem to be off. It's the first generation of Face Recognition and it works fine most of the time as long as the person does not have a Mustache, Beard or Pierced nose, lips, eye brow, cheek, chin... hats and eye glasses are sometimes an issue too.

This is not a magic tool, there will be misses. Faces are organic and there's no way you can reliably match it using software. Faces can have expressions, diff lighting, diff angle, they change with age. Live with it, software will never be perfect.

My old boss wanted something similar in our asset management software, she could not understand the fact that software could not create kewords from a picture, like "brown, sofa, sku#"

Sofa recognition? xD nice.

Jan 29, 09 - 12:01 pm Comment from: hardmanb

My wife and I got a iPhoto face recognition demonstration yesterday at the Applestore. Don't know how really useful the feature is, but it worked well on each of us, including the demonstrator. it is impressive, but not as much as video conferencing, which was slick.

As for glitches, we saw none, but remember that it is software, and limitations and problems will undoubtedly be subjected to Apple's steady improvement upgrades.

Well - so far I'm quite impressed with it. No - it is not perfect, but pretty damn good. Recognized granddaughter from first entry at age 4, it found her through the years down to about 1 year old. To me that is pretty fascinating.
Will it ever be perfect? No. What is?

In a surprisingly large minority of cases, iPhoto failed to detect the presence of a face

What the heck is a "large minority"???

Jan 29, 09 - 12:17 pm Comment from: Chip

Don't get me wrong, if it's crap I won't buy it, but this review's not so hot either. He mentions that it is not new technology in the marketplace, so then how does it actually compare to Google's Picasso face-recognition feature, and that of the other companies offering it? I would expect a good review to tell me that, but instead he blathers on about isolated examples of poor performance for the "large minority" of his review, taking away NB review time for the other iPhoto/iLife features. If iPhoto face-recognition the best currently out there for consumers, then perhaps it's relatively good, and I as a buyer would cut them a little slack.

Jan 29, 09 - 12:19 pm Comment from: Jimithy

I have to agree with Walt. There were a surprising number of photos in my library where there was a very clear face right in the center of the photo and it didn't detect any face at all, yet it detected a wallpaper pattern in the background as a face. Hopefully Apple improves this feature as time goes on. The technology to do it better than this exists: just look at the stuff casinos use.

Jan 29, 09 - 12:25 pm Comment from: Steve Jobs

The new Face detection worked extremely well on my iMac (22,000 photos). Several thousand of those photos are theatre photos, stage makeup, different hairstyles, etc. Faces was able to detect the overwhelming majority of faces present in my images. Faces was also able to 'suggest' a range of faces that might be a match, even with all the different looks. Is it perfect? About as perfect as the faces. Not every picture of a person reflects the same angle, lighting, color (suntan), eyewear, expression, shape (open or closed mouth, etc). Is it a useful tool? ABSOLUTELY! The ability to organize photos by event, place, or face will undoubtedly save time when I go searching for an old image of 'Sally from that show we did in Chicago' next week (or next year).

The implementation of manual geo-tagging is a bit clunky; but for photos with GPS information already embedded it's very good.

A word of caution for PowerMac G5 users who want to use the 'Learn to Play' function in GarageBand; it will only work on dual core Intel machines. Sigh. It does work fine on my new MacBook Pro, though.

I think Mossberg's face needs some work =)

Jan 29, 09 - 01:29 pm Comment from: Romeodawg

My GOD this guy is so incredibly slow and boring.... Walt - do you know the camera is running? Did you just roll out of bed? You can't tackle new media with this level of on-camera energy. Have some freakin coffee and get excited about what you're talking about, or stick to typing.

Jan 29, 09 - 01:35 pm Comment from: Lurker_PC

Hmm... Good to know. My wife and I were going to purchase iLife 09 this weekend - mainly because of Faces. I think we probably can hold off purchasing the 09 version of iLife (and iWork). Most of our photos were taken with a camera without the Geotagging capability anyway.

Besides my wife is interested in getting a refreshed Mac Mini or a headless iMac. So if either one of these items appear - most likely the refreshed Mac Mini - we'll get one copy of iLife 09 that she can use.

Peace.

Jan 29, 09 - 01:37 pm Comment from: Spark

@ Chad
49%

@Lurker_PC
Stop talking about your wife decisions.
I'm sure she decides for EVERYTHING.
Why don't you try to do things on your own without her approval first...
and as far as I am concerned why don't I shut up

It is a software tool, not magic. I wasn't expecting miracles, and am very pleased with the results.

If I name one fuzzy face, I get possible-matches all over the place. The more I positively identify, the more accurate the possible matches become. It took a few passes of matching/unmatching faces before it finally stopped adding more possible matches (mostly correct) and automatically removed bad possible matches. It appears to learn quite well.

Yes, there are still some matching faces it did not find, especially the ones in profile. I am sure there will be frequent updates to this product as Apple fine-tunes it's algorithms.

One added feature I would like to see is a sorting hierarchy where I can pick a face, then choose from the list of places where that face occurs, then see them listed by event. This would be a great improvement, allowing the user to sort by face/place/event in any order.

Usually I like reading Walt, but this time there's a big, glaring inconsistency that bothers me:

The headline say, in part, "Just Don't Ask It to Find a Face."
Then he says it works most of the time. Huh? If it works most of the time, what's with the headline? Must be just attention grabbing crap. I expected better from Walt (don't know why - he's just a journalist).

Face recognition is HARD, just ask the gubmint... they've been trying to do it for years. That it works "most of the time" is really quite amazing.

Guess Colonel Sanders had a bad day. Cut the guy some slack.

There is always something to complain about. If you don't like it design your own software, and sell if for 80 bucks.

Jan 30, 09 - 02:04 am Comment from: Predrag

Facial recognition is all fine and good, but what's happening to iDVD? We can edit HD in iMovie, but we can't author HD optical media unless we buy software from others?

It is extremely clunky to get Blu-ray discs out of home HD movies using iMovie and Toast 9 (or 10). Of course, you CAN do it in Adobe's CS4 Production, if you can afford the expense of another iMac just for software.

Steve or Tim, get us iDVD Blu-Ray (or iBluray, or whatever) fast!