Opinions of iPhoto 09 facial recognition accuracy?

[big_malk]

I have to say, I'm slightly disappointed with iPhoto 09 facial recognition.

I've just tagged myself, and the the suggestion of who it thought were me ranged from everyone from my gran, my two year old niece, and an alarming number of other women (I'm a guy).
This is after I'd confirmed lots of photos of myself, which it claims would make it more accurate!

I'd previously added people's names to the comments on photos so I could easily find peoples pictures, so I know I have over 600 pictures of myself, it has found only 116. I accept lots will be in poor lighting or not front-on pictures which it couldn't recognise - but getting only one 6th of them?

Sorry, I'm a bit disappointed.

[SomeDude2k]

It thought the skull and crossbones on the tail of an airplane from the airshow last year was my best friend's fiance. That was funny. But yeah, it's not quite what I was expecting.

[petvas]

at the moment all I can say that it is disappointing. I will post a small review later...

[Peace]

Mine won't even do face recognition. I click on a face and input the name then go to faces and nothing shows up in the bottom panel even though I have at least 100 pics of the same person.

[eleven2brett]

They should just contact the people over at CTU Los Angeles , their facial recognition is perfect.

[Luis Ortega]

It's crap, and just a gimmick that doesn't even work well.

[daneoni]

It is the suck!

[petvas]

I have many photos of my father (about 600). At first I created the name "My father" and assigned it to a photo. iPhoto found some photos of my father and it also prompted me to say which of them was indeed my father or not. Among the photos were many from women! Even after I trained it, it found only 40 photos out of 600...
Next was my mother...Well iPhoto couldnt find a single photo of her!! I am not joking...
Then I moved forward with a couple of friends, both male and female...The trend continued and the recognition didnt work well...I think it is better to assign keywords to photos...I miss the Keyword Manager and hope we will see an update soon!
iPhoto cant recognize pets...My dog's face wasnt recognized...

Now, let's see how Places work...Well, not really good!
I live in Mannheim and have many photos of my city. I tried assigning Mannheim as the location of these photos and iPhoto grouped all photos under "Ludwigshafen" (a different nearby city!!!)...
Many times I tell iPhoto to search for a place and it doesnt find it...after a while it does find it. Some places (for example the Munich fair) arent even grouped under the correct city...I am a bit disappointed

[kbmb]

I've had pretty good luck. Even was able to tell my 3 1/2 year old from current photos down to days after his birth.

The biggest problem is where the people really do look similar.

Overall...not to bad.

-Kevin

[rareflares]

Originally Posted by kbmb

The biggest problem is where the people really do look similar.
-Kevin

Yeah, too bad most of my pictures are of me and my family.

[kbmb]

Originally Posted by rareflares

Yeah, too bad most of my pictures are of me and my family.

Yeah....I never realized how closely I look like my Dad until I saw the zoomed in faces in iPhoto.

Overall I think it's a good start to something that hopefully they can improve by acquiring new technology.

-Kevin

[petvas]

Originally Posted by rareflares

Yeah, too bad most of my pictures are of me and my family.

that will be the case with most people...

ok, the automatic recognition doesnt work well but at least if u make the effort to go through all photos and assign the correct names to faces and name all places, then iPhoto 09 offers a very nice way of organizing your pics.

[jamesarm97]

Originally Posted by Luis Ortega

It's crap, and just a gimmick that doesn't even work well.

Or use Riya (http://riya.com) used them a few years ago when they first beta tested their stuff, worked pretty well at that time.

[kevindosi]

I just started using it and I'm amazed. I tagged one picture of myself, and it automatically found 300 pictures with me in it, and about 20 of them were wrong (mostly brothers, a couple of girls). Then I tagged 1 picture of my girlfriend and it came up with 250 pictures of her, and only ONE was wrong!
I don't know if we have distinct faces or what, but it's working incredibly well for me.

Edit:
After matching up faces for my girlfriend and me, facial recognition is failing miserably for everyone else. About 90% of the faces it suggests for other people are off. I guess it was too good to be true!

[levitynyc]

Ehh, it works ok.

My wife and sister in law look alike and it had a really hard time differentiating between them.

Plus it couldnt find my wife at all in our wedding photos, perhaps it was the make up....or perhaps I was duped and theres an impostor sleeping in bed next to me.

[Slurpy2k8]

I have to say: It sucks.

My frame of reference is google picasa's web-based face detection- which frankly blew me away. It was 90% accurate or so, even catching blurry, angled, and dark faces- this was after only tagging a couple photos of the person.

iPhoto isn't even 1/10th as good, after tagging 10X as many photos. It somehow manages to mislabel/skip completely clear faces facing the camera, which have already been labeled. Pretty dismal.

Also- where the hell is my iPhoto coverflow?? They actually put it in iMovie before iPhoto? That clip browser would have been brilliant in iphoto.

Apple's logic astounds me sometimes.

[mrkgoo]

When I first heard about these features, I thought that it was cool. However, I always wondered why people were simply RAVING about it when they hadn't even seen it in action yet. Granted, I never saw Phil's demo, so maybe that was awesome.

I still look forward to trying it, but I never had my hopes all that high.

[bnut]

Hmm, sounds interesting, the keynote certainly looked impressive and I thought this was probably the coolest thing in it. I might wait until they improve the accuracy before upgrading and getting my entire family tagged as inanimate objects :P

[CrackedButter]

I do a youth culture street project, I have over 10,000 images, for me it has worked very well, I just wish it was faster to select the images. iPhoto has learnt within a few images who I am looking for, it is good.

I had a laugh though before because I had an image of a friend with a thick beard, and iPhoto suggested he looked similar to a dog and an asian man.

But basically this is version 1 and iPhoto does need to learn, so teach it.

[Polska]

I don't know if my expectations were low or what but I was really pleased with the Faces . It was able to spot the person even with very shadowy face, half covered and etc. Sometimes it tries to go beyond and spot someone in a football crowd but I guess this is ok. I am satisfied.

Places is another matter. I use Geotagger in all my pictures and he was only able to identify the pictures that were taken with the iPhone.

Erick Pessôa

[Michael CM1]

Originally Posted by petvas

ok, the automatic recognition doesnt work well but at least if u make the effort to go through all photos and assign the correct names to faces and name all places, then iPhoto 09 offers a very nice way of organizing your pics.

I haven't gotten my copy yet (should be on the way today), but that is a definite good way of looking at it. It was really hard to separate every photo ever taken into just events. Now with places and faces, that's two other ways to separate stuff. I would just settle for Facebook-style tagging, but if it can do some recognition, that's awesome, especially for a $79 suite.

Some people may want to remember that each application (iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb, Garage Band) is basically costing you $20. At the basic level, these are very good deals.

[big_malk]

Maybe all you people getting good results just have better cameras and more skill with them

I'm also a little disappointed with Geotagging, but I guess that's more an iPhone disappointment than an iPhoto one. How do you know when it has accurately got your position while taking a photo?

[fletch33]

seemed to work as well as i expected it to for the first release. most of the pictures i have were taken with a digital camera that has facial recognition or tracking whatever it is called and maybe that made a difference.

looking forward to future updates as they advance this feature.

[kid rock]

i didnt have any big problems tbh, i did notice that if your wearing sunglasses it sometimes doesnt recognise you, but the biggest problem was on poorly taken pictures,good quality ones it worked everytime, badly taken ones it recognised the face but didnt know who to match to!

but overall for £69 and you get a few other programs you cannot actually argue that it isnt perfect!

[Xirian]

working pretty good for me... It did think that my pictures of me in drag from Halloween was my mother though, got a laugh from that one.