iPhoto '09: Faces data

Thought I'd start this thread for people to discover/add any info they have on what iPhoto Faces is doing behind the scenes to help with troubleshooting, since Apple doesn't have any preferences for Faces in the iPhoto GUI.

This is only for people who like to understand what is happening behind the scenes. Please note this is not for everyone and anytime you do anything to your iPhoto library you risk corruption and should have a backup copy.

What I've noticed so far:

- iPhoto scans the library the first time it opens, and creates 2 faces .db files with the iPhoto Library:

face_blob.db
face.db

- iPhoto creates Faces thumbnails files and places them in the iPhoto Library/Data folder along with the other thumbnails it creates.

For example, I have:

DSC_0202_face0.jpg
DSC_0202_face1.jpg
DSC_0202.jpg

So the DSC_0202.jpg is the thumbnail image that iPhoto had already created, and the initial face scan added the other 2 images because it recognized 2 faces in that image.

- I have tested that closing iPhoto and removing the 2 .db files will result in iPhoto re-scanning your entire library on the next start, losing all previous faces data. This might help people whose initial scan failed.

On this new scan, iPhoto will overwrite any thumbnails it created previously.



Feel free to add to this thread. I'm assuming that at some point real guru's will come up with those hidden preferences and terminal commands to adjust things.


-Kevin

ggjstudios said:

From Forum Rules:

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I have removed the content from the other post.
I have linked to this post.

Just a note, the other post was helping an individual on their specific issue, which I was using this data that I found. Afterwards I thought that the information would be useful for others who MAY NOT find the other post OR who would find more information that is NOT relevant to the original post.

-Kevin

Sky Blue said:

Is there a way to show photos that have unassigned faces in them? I can't find anything.

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I can't find anything in the interface. Smart albums are no help because they only check based on the fact that an image has Face data linked to it, not whether the face data exists or not.

If you find something, let me know.

-Kevin

roger6106 said:

I don't have iLife '09 yet, but can't you do something like "if face is [empty]"?

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Actually, I did just try a new smart album with:

Name - does not contain - "leave field blank"

This seems to work and give me a set of photos that don't have a name. In my case 19,225

When I find a photo, and add a name, the number goes down.

The only issue with this is, it will also find images that don't contain a face...or any people.

What Apple needs to add is the ability to show you all photos where iPhoto has recognized a face is in the photo, but has not been tagged yet.

-Kevin

shk718 said:

does anyone know if there is a way to exclude an event from scanning. lets say you have a group of pictures that are "objectionable" and you don't want them to accidently show up - which happened to me - apparently i look like a porn star.

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Porn star huh......well, I won't go there.

As for the exclude function, I sure can't find a way....maybe someone will find a hidden preference at some point. In typical Apple fashion their preferences are a little on the slim side. They don't even give you the ability to turn faces off completely if you didn't want to use it.

-Kevin

currie said:

So I tried to copy the faces.db file from one library to another and predictably it copied some of the name but had no photo to match up with.

Being able to search for the same faces in multiple libraries is important

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Interesting. The only thing I've done is copy the entire iPhoto library from one machine to another.....which as expected, worked fine.

When Faces first runs it creates the thumbnail faces images. I'm guessing that because the same images aren't in both libraries, then it can't match them.

-Kevin