21. April 2009 · Comments Off on iPhoto — For a Good Laugh · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

So I’m having a grand old time working on organizing my photos on my Macbook.  There’s software called “iPhoto” that seems quite intelligent.

I’ve already imported all my pictures from our desktop (32,000+ photos, about 30GB).

So one of the features I’m having fun with is iPhoto’s Face Recognition program.  Called “Faces”, based on a few initial tags in your photo albums, “Faces” will run through all your other photos and attempt to find other pictures that also have that particular face.

If done right, you can tag the faces on your photo, then upload them to something like Facebook, where the tags will also upload.

iPhoto also then categorizes all the photos by face, so if you click on “Howie”, ideally you’d see all photos where our dog, Howie, has been tagged.

As you can see in the first picture here, at the beginning of the “Faces” listing, iPhoto does a pretty good job matching my faces. But then, as you scroll down, you see some other faces appear: Jacob and even Maryann the Fotomom.


This was GREAT when I was tagging pictures of Dave.  Every white person with glasses showed up: Joe (Dave’s college roommate), Wendy Warlick, both Andy AND Suzy McNabb, our friend Bill from grad school, even a number of officers I worked with in the desert recently, especially if he had glasses!

Dave was wearing his military hat with Captain’s bars in several of his pictures, so one of the “Faces” that appeared was of a four-month-old Jacob wearing Daddy’s Captain’s hat.  Ha ha!

It’s certainly a good laugh…fortunately, as you go through each pass of tagging photos, you can run “Faces” again and each attempt will be improved.