Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

MacRumors

macrumors bot
Original poster
Apr 12, 2001
67,781
38,371


Apple today released iPhoto 8.1.1, an update to the photo management portion of the company's iLife suite of applications. The update addresses a pair of issues related to the "Faces" feature of iPhoto, including slow performance when displaying suggested matches and incorrect matching of faces. The update also fixes an issue with the book ordering panel not appearing correctly with some languages and corrects display of the second-generation iPod touch icon in iPhoto 's source list.
This update addresses issues affecting face recognition performance and accuracy. It also fixes minor issues in the areas of book ordering, and iPod touch support.

The update is recommended for all users of iPhoto '09.

For detailed information on this update, please visit this website: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3941
The update weighs in at 12.5 MB is currently available via Software Update. The update should also soon be available via Apple's Support Downloads page.

Article Link: Apple Addresses 'Faces' Bugs and Other Minor Issues With iPhoto 8.1.1 Update
 
That's too funny. I tried using faces for the first time just the other day, but it just sat there spinning. No results. I figured something was broken and gave up.

Maybe I'll give it another whirl after this update.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

I was hoping they would fix the green or red screen that would appear when editing photos.
 
I could never get faces to work in iPhoto. This update didn't make it work either. It's not that it matches poorly, it just doesn't turn up any matches at all.
 
You've got to train it up a bit first. I had good luck with it from the beginning, but haven't added any photos in a while, so I can't say I've noticed an issue.
 
You've got to train it up a bit first. I had good luck with it from the beginning, but haven't added any photos in a while, so I can't say I've noticed an issue.

I'm reimporting my library now. It was a brand new mac, and new library to begin with. I'll manually supervise some faces and see what happens. Another part of the problem I was having was that I couldn't remove the faces on the cork board. Once they were up on there, I couldn't trash them in order to start over.
 
Pay attention guys...

In the KB they says that you MUST rescan all the missing faces to clean the data you may have generated with a version prior to this one... Make sense.

Mine was working OK with all class of jpeg and png... with RAW a total failure. Their algorithms didn't support face detection in RAW at all...

I didn't try this one yet, I'll do that 2morrow...
 
I just got my new iMac last week and loaded up a bunch of photos. I 'trained iPhoto's faces with about two dozen pictures of my wife and of me. It then pulled up hundreds with about a 96% success rate. I was pretty impressed. I still need to 'train' it on a few other friends and relatives to see how it does.

I'm also taking the time to enter some locations for travel pictures. I wish my Canon G5 had the GPS stamping so it'd be automatic.
 
What about looking at Photos over a network?

I used to be able to look at pics off an iPhoto Library on a networked computer. Now is it DEADLY slow, basically unusable.

Does this update address that?
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

I was hoping they would fix the green or red screen that would appear when editing photos.

I was too. No luck here. It's strange, I can edit just fine but when I go try to go to full screen and do the same thing, red/green screen bizarreness.

Anyone know of good open source tools for photo editing? I know about GIMP, so I guess I'm really asking about photo management tools (open source).
 
Faces identified a cut-out cardboard picture of Obama as being my VERY white friend...
It also identified my new-born baby as being both me and my wife's sister.

On the whole it's accurate, but it makes some pretty funny isolated mistakes :)
 
so many times it missed a face that is clearly there and looking at the camera, but yet it identifies a face in a bit of bark, or some grass, or a tv.
 
well I had faces recognise a picture of (ogre) princess fiona as my sister :rolleyes:
 
From the Apple KB article

Important: If you imported photos of people while using iPhoto 8.1, there's an extra step you should take after installing the 8.1.1 update. Select all those photos, Control-click to open the contextual menu, and then choose Detect Missing Faces. This will redetect the faces in those photos and correct any face recognition issues introduced in iPhoto 8.1. You should not quit iPhoto during the Detect Missing Faces process.

how the hell do you find out when you installed iPhoto 8.1??

I guess I would have to create a Smart Album using that date onwards and then re-scan for faces?
 
From the Apple KB article



how the hell do you find out when you installed iPhoto 8.1??

I guess I would have to create a Smart Album using that date onwards and then re-scan for faces?
iPhoto 8.1 was released on August 18. I just selected all my photos since august and rescanned.

Not sure if that was right, but that's what I did. No need to create a smart album, just click on photos int eh sidebar (that's ALL photos), select the first photo you want, then scroll all the way to recent, hold shift + select the latest then right click and detect missing faces.
 
iPhoto 8.1 was released on August 18. I just selected all my photos since august and rescanned.

Not sure if that was right, but that's what I did. No need to create a smart album, just click on photos int eh sidebar (that's ALL photos), select the first photo you want, then scroll all the way to recent, hold shift + select the latest then right click and detect missing faces.

ok, thanks for the info.. will give it a go tonight :)
 
recognition

I love the faces feature, it's been working great for me - tho Apple doesn't really explain that iPhoto needs to be warmed up with a few faces first - but after that, it's pretty freakin' good. The places feature is what's a little slow for me, but then again, I am *borrowing* internet.
 
iPhoto hasn't successfully identified me once, out of 86 pictures of my face, though once it thought I was a chair in the background, which isn't really flattering either.

Further more, it generally has a difficult time identifying people in general. It's gotten pretty good at working out that there is a face, but not who it is.

So, I quit using it.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

After the update, I now am having probs with syncing my iPhone. It gives me an error -50. If I turn off photo syncing in iTunes it syncs fine. Also in iTunes under the photos tab I am now forced to try and sync my whole iPhoto library or nothing the option to select albums is grayed out.
 
Faces shortcoming in iPhoto

Note: am using iPhoto with the 8.1 update; have not downloaded 8.1.1 yet.
One Faces shortcoming is that it only seems to recognize human faces. Would be great if it could identify different cat faces as well. I tried it on pictures of my two cats (they are quite different in appearance) and it didn't work at all.
 
Note: am using iPhoto with the 8.1 update; have not downloaded 8.1.1 yet.
One Faces shortcoming is that it only seems to recognize human faces. Would be great if it could identify different cat faces as well. I tried it on pictures of my two cats (they are quite different in appearance) and it didn't work at all.

Fury animals is hard for AI face recognition engines to detect which animal is which.

I've never had a problem with iPhoto face recognition. After a while training it, it find the correct faces most of the time. I once had a characture made of me, iPhoto recognised it was me.
 
Fury animals is hard for AI face recognition engines to detect which animal is which.

iPhoto Faces only uses faces it detects itself for recognition - not faces that you add as "missing faces". If Faces didn't find the face and you add a missing face, it is not considered for training.

Unless Faces found a cat face, you have no way of training Faces to find the cats anyway.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.