8. Organizing Your Photos: Faces
In this chapter, you learn how to use iPhoto’s built-in facial recognition software to organize your photos by the people in them. Apple calls this feature Faces—and it’s one of iPhoto’s coolest tools.
→ Creating Faces collections
→ Navigating the Faces corkboard
→ Naming and matching faces
→ Using Faces with Facebook
Faces is one of those features of iPhoto that makes you take a step back and go “Wow!” With Faces, iPhoto uses facial recognition technology built in to the software to identify and group individuals into collections of photos. This way you can easily see all pictures of your child, spouse, or a particular friend in a single location—the Faces corkboard.
The Faces feature, like events, albums, and smart albums, is just another excellent and fun way iPhoto lets you easily sort, navigate, and organize your photos into manageable collections. It also shows you the power of iPhoto. Who would have ever thought that our computers would be able to pick out and identify our friends and family in our photographs with very little effort on our part?
Creating Faces Collections
When you select Faces for the first time, you see the Find Faces screen. The Find Faces screen displays thumbnails of people iPhoto thinks could be important to you. It’s then up to you to name a person in the thumbnail or reject them. Naming a face adds that face to the Faces corkboard.
Create a Faces Collection
1. Select Faces in iPhoto’s source list. By default, iPhoto will have already scanned the photos in your iPhoto Library to pick out and identify faces of people who appear in your photographs.
2. Choose to name or hide any of the faces shown to you.
3. Click the Show More Faces button to see more faces.
4. Click the Continue to Faces button to go to existing Faces collections.
Name a Face for the First Time
If the Find Faces screen shows you a face that is important to you, you’ll want to name it so that person is added to your Faces corkboard.
1. Click Unnamed in the naming field below a face.
2. Enter the name of the person in the photo. You can enter just a first name, first and last names, or even a nickname. As you begin entering a person’s name, iPhoto displays the names of people who match the text you’ve entered so far from your Contacts, already-added faces, or Facebook friends (if you’ve signed in to your Facebook account in iPhoto). Click any of the selected results from the name pop-up menu to apply that name to the face, or continue entering a different name. After you have entered a name, press Return.
Ignore a Face
Sometimes you might not want to name a face that iPhoto has detected. Perhaps it’s just a random person in a crowd or someone you don’t like very much (like your pesky boss). iPhoto allows you to ignore these faces.
1. Move your mouse over the face’s thumbnail.
2. Click the white x inside the black circle at the upper-left corner of the thumbnail. The face thumbnail fades, signifying that iPhoto knows to ignore it in the future. If you have mistakenly told iPhoto to ignore a face you want to track, move your mouse over the thumbnail again, and click the x a second time.
3. After you have completed naming or ignoring the faces on the screen, you can click the Show More Faces button to see more faces. iPhoto displays another series of faces that you can choose to name or ignore.
4. Click the Continue to Faces button when you’re done naming faces. You see the Faces corkboard where your selected faces are displayed.
The Faces Corkboard
The Faces corkboard displays collections of photos that your family and friends appear in. After the first time you name people in Faces, you automatically see the Faces corkboard when you select Faces from iPhoto’s source list.
A thumbnail photograph that looks like an old Polaroid picture represents each Faces collection. Below a Faces collection is the name of the person written in Felt Marker font. When you are on the corkboard, double-click any Faces collection to see all the photos that iPhoto has recognized that person in.
Set Faces Key Photos
As you skim your mouse across each Faces collection, you see a close-up, or headshot, of the individual’s face in every photo he or she appears in that iPhoto has recognized. You can use any headshot as the key photo for that particular Faces collection. The key photo is the image that appears in the Polaroid-type border.
1. Skim your cursor left to right over the desired Faces collection.
2. When you find the photo that you want to represent the person in the collection, press the spacebar on your keyboard, or right-click and choose Make Key Photo from the contextual menu.
The Faces Information Pane
As with events and individual photos, you can click the Info button in the toolbar while you’re on the Faces corkboard so that you can see more information about the selected Faces collection.
• Key photo: This is the thumbnail that represents the person for the Faces collection. You can change the key photo in the Information Pane by running your mouse across it and clicking when you see the photo you’d like to set. Changing the key photo here also changes the key photo on the corkboard.
• Name: In this field, you can enter the full name of the person in the Faces collection. This is handy when you might have the collection name displayed on the corkboard as “Mom” or a nickname like “Kaboom” but you want to enter the person’s actual name to use for searches. You can also change the name of the person at any time by double-clicking the existing name under the Polaroid photo and entering a new one.
• Email address: In this field, you can enter the email address for the person in the Faces collection. At first, this feature might seem rather random, but it actually comes in handy when you start using the integrated Facebook features of iPhoto. If you have an email address associated with a face, iPhoto uses that information to work with Facebook in accurately identifying Facebook friends in your photos when you upload them.
• Dates: This tells you the range of dates in which the photos in the collection were taken. If you have baby photos of your grandpa, this date range could be decades.
• Number of photos: This is the number of photos of the person in the Faces collection.
• Unconfirmed matches: This tells you the number of photos iPhoto thinks the selected individual might be in. Clicking the arrow takes you to the photo confirmation screen.
• Location: This area displays a map of the various locations of the photos the person appears in.
Viewing a Faces Collection
Sorting your photos into Faces collections is actually kind of fun, but the real power of Faces comes when you’re ready to view your pictures. A Faces collection acts just like a smart album for the most part, with the exception that the Faces “album” only contains photographs of the same person and cannot have any other criteria applied to it.
1. Double-click the Faces collection thumbnail of the person you want to view.
2. All the photos that iPhoto has recognized as a particular individual appear. By default, you’ll see only the headshots of the selected person.
3. To view the entire photo, click the Photos/Faces slider in the upper-right corner. All the headshots of the person change to full photographs.
4. Note the alert that the person in the Faces collection you are viewing may be in additional photos.
5. Click the Confirm Additional Faces button to confirm the additional photos now.
6. To go to the previous or next Faces collection, click the Back or Forward button.
7. To return to the Faces corkboard, click the All Faces button.
Photos in Multiple Faces Collections
Because many photos have more than one person in them, the same photo often appears in more than one Faces collection. However, although multiple people can be named in each photo—and thus that photo can appear in multiple Faces collections—an individual’s face in a single photo cannot be named more than once.
Confirming or Rejecting Suggested Matches in a Faces Collection
Every time you import photos to your library, iPhoto automatically scans them to detect any known or unknown faces. When iPhoto thinks it might have a match for an existing person in your Faces collection, it displays a notification in two locations.
1. When a face is selected on the corkboard and the Information Pane is open, you see an Unconfirmed Matches note. Click the arrow to enter the Faces confirmation screen. Or...
2. ...when you double-click to view the photos in a Faces collection, you see an Additional Photos note in the bar at the bottom of the screen. In the example, iPhoto thinks Joana might be in 17 additional photographs. Click the Confirm Additional Faces button to enter the Faces confirmation screen.
3. You see the existing matched photos with your selected person, followed by photos that iPhoto thinks the person may be in. These unconfirmed Faces photos all have a black Click to Confirm bar running along the bottom.
2. The black Click to Confirm bar changes to green, and the person’s name appears in it.
3. Click Done.
It Pays to Confirm
Confirmed faces become part of a person’s Faces collection. Confirming faces increases iPhoto’s accuracy at predicting who appears in your photos, so it’s a good idea to check frequently to see whether iPhoto has any Faces suggestions for you.
Reject a Faces Match
If the person in the unconfirmed photo is not a match for the person in the Faces collection, you should let iPhoto know.
1. Click an unconfirmed photo twice so the black bar changes from black to green and finally to red. You can also hold down the Option key on your keyboard and click a photo once to confirm it is not a match. The red bar reads “Not [name].”
2. Click Done.
Confirming Multiple Matches
You can confirm or deny multiple matches at the same time by selecting a group of unconfirmed photos; just drag the mouse around them and then click any of the selected photos once to confirm they are a match or twice to confirm they are not a match. Click the Done button to finalize your selection.
Correcting Mistaken Matches
If you’ve made a mistake, you can always go back and click the green confirmed bar for any photo to tell iPhoto that the photo is not a match. The photo will be removed from that Faces collection.
Rescanning Your Photo Library for Faces
If you know the person in your selected Faces collection is in other photographs despite them not showing up in the Additional Faces confirmation screen, you can tell iPhoto to rescan all the photos in your library.
1. Select Faces in the source list.
2. Choose Photos, Detect Missing Faces.
3. Return to your Faces collection and see whether iPhoto has found any other unconfirmed matches for your existing Faces collections. Or ...
4. ...click the Find Faces button in the toolbar, which takes you to the Find Faces screen again, and see whether iPhoto has picked up any new faces in your photo library.
Increased False-Positives
During a rescan, iPhoto rescans your library with less-stringent criteria than in the original scan. This can result in more false positives for the selected individual, however.
Naming Faces and Adding Missing Faces Manually
Sometimes iPhoto won’t recognize that certain people who already have a Faces collection are in other photos. This can be because of the angle of the person’s face in the photo, or perhaps there is a large age gap in the person from one photo to the next (like if you have a picture of your grandma when she was 10 and another when she was 80).
Other times, iPhoto might not even detect a face in a photo. This is primarily because of the angle of the face in the photo or the quality of the image.
In either case, you can manually add a person to an existing Faces collection or tell iPhoto that it is not detecting a face in a photograph.
Name a Person with an Existing Detected Face
You can name a person manually if iPhoto doesn’t recognize a person you know is in a photograph.
1. Select the photo that contains the person in your iPhoto Library.
2. Click the Info button in the toolbar.
3. Move the mouse over the unnamed person’s face so a box appears around it.
4. Click the Unnamed pop-up menu under the person’s face and enter the name of the person. Doing this tells iPhoto it is indeed the same person as the one in the Faces collection.
Creating a Faces Collection from Within a Photo
You can also use the previous steps to create Faces collections when viewing a photo instead of using the Find Faces feature. This means you can jump right in to naming your favorite people instead of relying on iPhoto to pick out their faces.
Add a Face Manually
Sometimes for whatever reason, iPhoto’s face detection software fails to recognize a perfectly obvious face. If this happens, you can manually tell iPhoto the face exists and name the person in it.
1. Select the photo that contains the face you want to recognize.
2. Click the Info button in the toolbar.
3. Click the Add a Face button under the Faces header.
4. A new Face field appears over the selected photo.
5. Drag and resize the Face field to the correct location on the unrecognized face.
6. Click the Click to Name pop-up menu and add the name of the person. If it is of an existing person in a Faces collection, the photo is added to that collection. If it is a new person, a new Faces collection is added to the Faces corkboard.
Helping Faces Help You
When adding faces manually, it is a good idea to find a photo of the person in profile, as well as head-on, and name both. Naming both profile shots of people and head-on shots gives iPhoto a better chance of finding more photos of them no matter what their orientation in the photograph.
Removing People from Faces
iPhoto enables you to remove a Faces collection from your corkboard. This is especially handy if you want to stop tracking which photos a certain person appears in—say, your ex—or if you’ve just decided you don’t need to create a Faces collection for every single person in your iPhoto Library, like the hotdog vendor on 53rd Street.
1. Click Faces in iPhoto’s source list.
2. Select the Faces collection you want to remove so it is highlighted in a blue border.
3. Hold the Command key and then press Delete.
4. Click the Delete Face button. The person’s collection is removed from the corkboard, and her name is removed from any photo she appears in. The photos in which she appears still remain in your iPhoto Library.
Using Faces with Facebook
It seems everyone these days is using Facebook, and of course one of the big features of Facebook is photo sharing. With iPhoto, Apple has made it easy for you to post photos from your iPhoto Library directly to your Facebook wall. Read Chapter 13, “Sharing Your Photos Digitally,” for information about Facebook sharing, including setting up iPhoto for use with your Facebook account. This section briefly explains how Faces works with Facebook.
Just as iPhoto lets you add names to people in photographs in your iPhoto Library, Facebook lets you add names to people in photographs that you post on its site. When you add a name to a person in a Facebook.com photo, Facebook calls it tagging. Naming faces in iPhoto works hand in hand with tagging people in Facebook photos.
Specifically, when you upload a photo to Facebook through iPhoto’s sharing features, any names you have applied to people in your photos are cross-checked with your Facebook friends. This is done by checking the email address associated with your Faces collections. If the email address assigned to a Faces collection matches the email address a friend uses to log in to his Facebook account, Facebook knows to apply a tag of that person to the photo after it is posted.
The image of Abbey on the left was named using Faces in iPhoto. When that image was uploaded to Facebook (right) via iPhoto, Facebook knew to tag Abbey in it automatically even though she uses her full name—Abigail—on Facebook.
So, if you’ve named a photo of a person in iPhoto, there’s no need to tag that person on Facebook.com if you’ve uploaded it through iPhoto’s built-in Facebook sharing feature. Pretty cool, huh?