Faces in Aperture 3
With Apple’s release of Aperture 3 yesterday came some interesting new features, particularly “Faces,” Apple’s face recognition algorithm. This feature has been around in iPhoto for a little while, and now it’s been overhauled and included in their professional photo management package, so I thought I’d give it a whirl.
Getting Started with Faces
One of the first things Aperture 3 does is convert your photo library, which can take considerable time. On my machine, a MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz with 3 GB of RAM, a 7200 rpm drive, and an all-referenced library of just over 6400 photos, this took around half an hour. And Aperture may take several hours indeed to scan faces if your library is sizable. In my case, it took about 2.5 hours and was a terrible resource hog. While it’s running, you can still use Aperture, and if you click on Faces, it will indicate its progress by showing one of the faces it’s detecting. Some faces take longer to process than others; I assume this is because it’s trying to match the current face with others it has already indexed. During this time you will most likely notice a lot of “faces” that aren’t faces at all.
Portions of photos Aperture 3 thought were faces
Once all the faces that Aperture is going to detect have been processed (it probably won’t find them all), it’s time to enlighten it as to who the faces belong to. This is where Aperture surprised me. After giving a name to a face, Aperture pins a photo of the named person to a cork board in the window. Just as in Projects, you can quickly scan all the photos linked with the person by mousing over it. By double clicking on the face, Aperture will offer suggestions of other faces it thinks might be a match—and it does a pretty good job of it. That’s not to say there aren’t a lot of false positives, but overall, it was pretty accurate. It was particularly adroit at differentiating my wife from her sister, something many people experience difficulty with at first.
There were a few photos where it really dropped the ball, however. For example, Aperture didn’t detect any face at all in several crisp, well-lit portraits, and there were quite a few photos where it confused a young woman for an elderly man, or even a background of leaves for my cousin. But within an hour or so, Aperture had given names to several thousand faces. And for those faces it didn’t recognize, it’s easy enough to add them manually.
After a day’s use, I have only a couple of minor complaints with Aperture 3. First, when scanning the corkboard photos you’ll sometimes come across an incorrectly assigned face. It would be nice if there were a contextual menu item to unlink the face from the person right there, or at least an option to take you directly to the photo. Right now, in the Unnamed Faces pane, there is the option to select “Not a Face” if something appears there like a beer bottle or a pinecone. I’d also like to see this option added to the “Confirm Faces” workflow. Finally, I’d like to be able to review the faces I skipped in the Unnamed Faces pane.
Workflow Tips
Duplicate Faces
Aperture uses your address book to get the names of people you know and offers them as suggestions for the faces. Let’s suppose during the process of naming faces that you’ve found your groove, but your finger slips and you you hit return before the suggestion was finished. You’ll end up with two “faces” of the same person: one for Fred and one for Fred McGillicuddy, for example. Fixing this is easy. Just drag Fred’s face on top of the Fred McGillicuddy’s, and Aperture will merge the two faces into one.
Personal Info
When you hover over a polaroid, a little “i” button appears. Clicking on it brings up a small HUD with this person’s display name, how many photos they appear in, a date range, full name and email address. If you use one of Aperture’s suggestions from your address book, some of these fields may already be filled in. Filling out the fields for each person in this HUD can be helpful in preventing the duplicates mentioned above, making the workflow go even more quickly.
The Bottom Line
All in all, Apple’s flagship photo management application, Aperture, continues to impress with its polished appearance, easy workflow and non-destructive image manipulation. And with its many new features, such as Faces (along with Location and Video), photographers should find it well worth upgrading to version 3.