Photography
iPhoto Faces
Mar/02/10 06:09 PM
I know how late this is, but I have just begun to work with faces in iPhoto. I had been previously using Aperture and while it is really nice, it’s more advanced than what I need to do simple organization of my photo collection, which is primarily my family, with a healthy dose of motorcycle trips. My previous catalogs have always been minimal, a group for family, one for friends, including fishing tournaments, as well as the all-encompassing Scenery, which covered anything from mountains to the beach.
Trying to take advantage of the multiple ways that photos can be organized in iPhoto, I began tagging them, a practice I started while using Aperture. This is pretty tedious work, my library is currently only about 3500 photos, but will explode once I get around to scanning the shoebox(es) full of 4x6’s, negatives and slides. iPhoto uses events as a description, which is like a mini-album, and I am finding very useful. This is pretty much my first step when bringing photos into iPhoto. There are selectable parameters for what constitutes an event, but I generally upload photos the day of, or shortly after they are taken. The events can be set up via day, week or even 2 or 8 hour gaps. All imported photos are imported into their own event as well. From the events, I can select multiple photos and tag them appropriately.
From the Events, they are sorted into folders, or groups that can have several albums in them. One example is my weather folder, or group. It has albums that include rain, snow, sunshine and ice. This used to be the end of my sorting. Most of my folders were not that specific, such as the previously mentioned Scenery folder. I currently have 8 folders, one of which is Geotagged photos, something I discovered a few years ago. This is also a relatively new feature of iPhoto, introduced in iPhoto ’08, I believe. I currently use a GPS Datalogger and HoudahGeo to Geotag my photos, but have my eye on a Nikon Coolpix P9000, which has the GPS built in.
The newest way for me to organize my photos is the faces feature. The faces pane in the application looks like a corkboard with faces pinned up in a Polaroid frame. Clicking on a person will bring up the collection of confirmed photos of that face, or person in the entire library. To add someone to Faces, you must first select a photo and click on Name in the lower toolbar to confirm the name, which creates a new person on the corkboard if there was not one there before. Navigating to the faces pane, and selecting a face also prompts iPhoto to start scanning the entire photo collection for faces that match. After the scan is complete, you have the opportunity to confirm or deny if each photo is in fact the face you are looking for. I am currently in the middle of this process and have only been confirming photos, not denying that the other people are not the face I am looking for. The first is more than likely a learning phase for iPhoto, and I plan to run through each person twice, perhaps three times, actually denying the false photos the second time. So far it is working, although slowly, but that’s probably my fault for not denying the false matches. The thought of clicking ‘no’ 2000 plus times is not very fun.
Hopefully the end result will be a photo album that I can narrow down to location, person, thing or date. As it stands now, due to exporting to Aperture to try, working there, then importing back into iPhoto, finding just about any photo is hit or miss. I enjoy looking through my photos, but when I want a particular one for a project or to verify something, the quick scanning can get a bit tedious.
Trying to take advantage of the multiple ways that photos can be organized in iPhoto, I began tagging them, a practice I started while using Aperture. This is pretty tedious work, my library is currently only about 3500 photos, but will explode once I get around to scanning the shoebox(es) full of 4x6’s, negatives and slides. iPhoto uses events as a description, which is like a mini-album, and I am finding very useful. This is pretty much my first step when bringing photos into iPhoto. There are selectable parameters for what constitutes an event, but I generally upload photos the day of, or shortly after they are taken. The events can be set up via day, week or even 2 or 8 hour gaps. All imported photos are imported into their own event as well. From the events, I can select multiple photos and tag them appropriately.
From the Events, they are sorted into folders, or groups that can have several albums in them. One example is my weather folder, or group. It has albums that include rain, snow, sunshine and ice. This used to be the end of my sorting. Most of my folders were not that specific, such as the previously mentioned Scenery folder. I currently have 8 folders, one of which is Geotagged photos, something I discovered a few years ago. This is also a relatively new feature of iPhoto, introduced in iPhoto ’08, I believe. I currently use a GPS Datalogger and HoudahGeo to Geotag my photos, but have my eye on a Nikon Coolpix P9000, which has the GPS built in.
The newest way for me to organize my photos is the faces feature. The faces pane in the application looks like a corkboard with faces pinned up in a Polaroid frame. Clicking on a person will bring up the collection of confirmed photos of that face, or person in the entire library. To add someone to Faces, you must first select a photo and click on Name in the lower toolbar to confirm the name, which creates a new person on the corkboard if there was not one there before. Navigating to the faces pane, and selecting a face also prompts iPhoto to start scanning the entire photo collection for faces that match. After the scan is complete, you have the opportunity to confirm or deny if each photo is in fact the face you are looking for. I am currently in the middle of this process and have only been confirming photos, not denying that the other people are not the face I am looking for. The first is more than likely a learning phase for iPhoto, and I plan to run through each person twice, perhaps three times, actually denying the false photos the second time. So far it is working, although slowly, but that’s probably my fault for not denying the false matches. The thought of clicking ‘no’ 2000 plus times is not very fun.
Hopefully the end result will be a photo album that I can narrow down to location, person, thing or date. As it stands now, due to exporting to Aperture to try, working there, then importing back into iPhoto, finding just about any photo is hit or miss. I enjoy looking through my photos, but when I want a particular one for a project or to verify something, the quick scanning can get a bit tedious.
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