iPhoto
The '09 version of iPhoto is aesthetically unaltered from iPhoto '08, but now, in addition to the Events tab, you'll notice the Faces and Places organisation options. Faces uses facial recognition technology to identify individual faces in every one of your photos, figure out who's who, then sort your photos based on who appears in them.
When you first load up iPhoto '09 it automatically begins looking for faces in your library. It took under an hour on our machine, and we have about 2,500 photos. It found, at a very rough guess, about 75 per cent of the faces in our collection. Profile shots it had difficulty with, and on one occasion it amusingly identified a tongue as a face.
 |
As we browsed through our collection it asked us 'Is this so-and-so?' when it thought it recognised a face. We click yes, and iPhoto gets smarter at recognising that face. Say no, and you can enter your own name. Any faces it identifies and can't even suggest a name for -- most of our pictures fell into this category, sadly (we know some odd-looking people, as you can see) -- you need to enter them manually. You can also add 'missing faces' to any photos in which a face wasn't spotted by the software.
It's by no means a perfect system, and in our photo collection at least, the automation didn't impress us. Spend some time appending names to your photos, however, and the resulting clipboard of Polaroid-esque headshots is amazing, and a great new way of browsing photos. You can create smart albums too, so if you want to create a collection of photos that only contain you and your statistically significant other, you can. It works just like Smart Playlists do in iTunes.
iPhone App 
Newsletters 
RSS Feeds 
Send Us Tips 
