iPhoto FACES

I copied all my pics off my old Mac onto my new one that has iPhoto 09 with the FACES feature. I've identified and labeled a dozen faces but the FACES feature won't find any matches. I have sometimes ten or more matches that I've selected for faces, and there are dozens more, but I never see FACES finding any. I get the separator bar that says

"(name) may also be in the photos below"

and a little activity circle moving around but it never finds anything for any of my pictures. Most of them are good quality full face shots. What's wrong?

thanks.

Same issue here. I gave up on it.

i had the same issue as well. how can i address this issue. do you think calling apple will have any help

Gave up on it as well. Not sure what Apple could do for you. Might just take some time and advances in technology.

I'll be watching this thread to see if anyone comes up with an answer. I set up my Faces and it works like a champ. I thought your problems may have been due to one of our most recent updates but I just checked again and it still finds all of the ones I IDed. I only have about a half a dozen different faces recognized for reference but I clicked on each one and all the photos that matched the Faces came up for me.

It probably doesn't help that I am terrible at taking pictures!

Faces has to look at every photo in your library and index it before it can find a face, depending how many photos and speed of your Mac this could take a long time, maybe even hours. Once this is finished it will find new faces in a few seconds as you add new photos. I have even had it to find faces in photos hanging on the wall behind other people, and name it correctly. So faces does work and work very well if you give it time and help it get started off right.

mdfuller said:

It probably doesn't help that I am terrible at taking pictures!

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LOL! Don't blame your picture taking. Faces isn't flawless.
In fact, it once found a picture of my lovely wife and asked if it was "this person"...who turned out to be some random guy in one of my photos and it wasn't a very flattering picture! *sigh* Needless to say my wife wasn't very pleased with my mac that day.

randoo53 said:

LOL! Don't blame your picture taking. Faces isn't flawless.
In fact, it once found a picture of my lovely wife and asked if it was "this person"...who turned out to be some random guy in one of my photos and it wasn't a very flattering picture! *sigh* Needless to say my wife wasn't very pleased with my mac that day.

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Haha I don't blame her. That has happened for my sister actually.

It gets better with the more faces you ID, particularly of the same person at different camera angles. It's not perfect though and probably will never be.

After doing a Google search on this topic, I found a lot of problems have been reported to Apple already and they are working on a solution. At least it wasn't something I did.

cwa107 said:

It gets better with the more faces you ID, particularly of the same person at different camera angles.

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I started playing with it a bit last night and Chris is correct. The more faces I identify, the more it finds. It does seem to have some difficulty with my cat and my brother-in-law's dog. Probably due to all the photos of their hind ends tearing around the yard!

Anyone know how to get it to rescan the whole iPhoto library at once after it already scanned the whole thing months ago? I can only get it to scan one event at a time.

XJ-linux said:

I started playing with it a bit last night and Chris is correct. The more faces I identify, the more it finds. It does seem to have some difficulty with my cat and my brother-in-law's dog. Probably due to all the photos of their hind ends tearing around the yard!

Anyone know how to get it to rescan the whole iPhoto library at once after it already scanned the whole thing months ago? I can only get it to scan one event at a time.

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I remember reading that animal faces were a problem. Not sure how to get it to rescan the whole library. I've just let it gradually build its database over time and I'd say that about 90% of my photos are now correctly identified.

Now the only issue I have is baby photos - my two boys looked a lot alike as infants, and iPhoto just can't tell the baby pictures apart. Then again, if it wasn't for dates, I might have trouble too.

From everything I've read, animals are NOT supposed to be part of the equation. That's not to say it may or may not work, but the mathematical calculations are set up for the human structure.
If I can find where I read that, I will post it here.
Then again, i know some dogs and their owners that are so much alike its almost scary. I wonder how funny it would be to get a match?

Edit: Some folks apparently have had good luck getting Faces to recognize cats faces but still no luck for the dogs in our lives.