iPhoto '09 (#2): Problems with faces, places

Apple's iLife '09 software suite has a slew of new features for organizing and managing photos, video projects, and personal websites. These features are welcomed additions, but as with any new feature they do not come bug-free.

Before upgrading, users should be sure to back up their photos and movie projects, as opening them in the new versions will upgrade them so they will not work in previous versions. Since the iLife suite installs many programs and support files, it is recommended to have a full system snapshot backup available so users can restore their systems if something goes wrong with the installation. Time Machine, or a system cloning utility such as SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner should work fine for this.

Faces In iPhoto '09, the "Faces" feature is automatically started when users first open the program. Photos in the library are searched for faces and indexed so users can apply names to them and set up the faces database. For several users this did not work properly. Either the faces scan hangs, or seems to run the photos swiftly and not recognize any faces in pictures.

Ronny Keil:

"I think my face scan ran, but after it was finished, iPhoto did not recognize any faces, which is kinda strange. And now it's running the scan again, but it's not really progressing."

When Faces initially sets up, it creates a few database files in the user's iPhoto library and then scans through the photos, tagging face patterns. Unfortunately Apple does not provide an option to re-scan the library for faces, so if this does not work the first time, users will have these three options:

• Manually add Faces For each photo, users can select it and click the "Names" button on the bottom toolbar to bring up the Faces editor. If faces are found on the image they will display with squares around them and places to tag them, but if not users can "Add a missing face" and manually outline a face and tag it. iPhoto should then use this data in future face recognitions.
• Reimport the library The library may have been improperly imported, in which case it is best to quit iPhoto and replace the library with a recent backup (preferably done before updating). Then launch iPhoto again and the library should be updated again.
• Remove the Faces database The Faces databases are files located in the iPhoto library. Users having problems with the initial scans can try removing these files by right-clicking on the iPhoto library in the Finder and selecting "Show Package Contents...". Then remove the "faces.db" and "faces_blob.db" files and restart the program. This should cause iPhoto to rescan the library for faces again.

As with any automatic recognition feature, Faces will have to learn based on user input and will initially make mistakes, such as improperly labeling faces, or identifying objects as faces. However, for some users there seems to be a problem with iPhoto not properly managing user-defined faces. When users drag a box around an unmarked face and give it a label, the program will not match it with automatically identified faces (from the initial scan) of the same person (or even others) that have not yet been labeled. Despite this, faces that were automatically identified in the scan and subsequently labeled will properly match with other scanned images.

Places Additionally in iPhoto, users are having problems with importing geotagged images. Many of the images for some users end up located in bizarre places such as the middle of an ocean, or on a continent the user has not visited before. Unfortunately this kind of error usually is a result of improperly interpreted metadata, and while this is most likely a bug in how iPhoto handles certain geotagging formats, users can get around it by manually entering geographical information. As with iTunes, users can apply the same metadata information to multiple photos at a time. To do this for geographic information, select all photos from a particular location and click the "i" button at the lower left of one photo. Then check the second checkbox next to the location field, and click the location field. If the location has not been defined yet, choose "New Place..." and users will be able search for and drop a pin on the location the photos were taken. Clicking "Assign to Photos" will then propagate the new location to all the selected photos.

As with a lot of their products, Apple's philosophy seems to be that they want users to use all the features available in their products, so they are enabled by default. In iPhoto the Faces and Places features for photos are automatically turned on, with no options for how to limit their behaviors. The only option seems to be for the automatic lookup of "Places", which can be turned off in the "Advanced" section of the iPhoto preferences.

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