Aperture - how long will face detection take?

[btownguy]

A few specs. 25,000 photos imported into a brand new installation of Aperture. The computer is a late 2013 rMBP, 16Gb/2.6/1Tb/dGPU. How long should I expect face detection to take? It's been going for maybe an hour.

 

[flynz4]

Most enthusiasts and professionals that I have talked with, turn off "faces". It is currently a consumer toy... not a professional tool.

Personally... I use tags rather than faces.

/Jim

 

[btownguy]

Most enthusiasts and professionals that I have talked with, turn off "faces". It is currently a consumer toy... not a professional tool.

Personally... I use tags rather than faces.

/Jim

Ah, that makes sense. I have never really used the feature and just turned it off. Question about that, will it remove any data (i.e. reduce my library file size) by doing so? Or will the face detection information stay in the database in case I decide to turn this on in the future?

 

[flynz4]

Ah, that makes sense. I have never really used the feature and just turned it off. Question about that, will it remove any data (i.e. reduce my library file size) by doing so? Or will the face detection information stay in the database in case I decide to turn this on in the future?

I am not 100% sure how the face detection works. I do not think it is "storing faces" per se. I suspect that it is just doing real time computing on the images to identify faces... and then using the "faces" metadata as tags.

So... I think you can turn it on/off at any time without worry... and it will not significantly affect the library size. For sure... it does affect (negatively) the compute cycles needed to run the application. The performance degradation seems to increase with library size.

/Jim