Q: Faces between 2 Macs
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Jun 7, 2015 7:40 PMby markwmsn,That's the way Photos is designed to behave. See Use Photos and iCloud Photo Library on multiple Mac computers - Apple Support:
These items are available only on the Mac where you created them:
- Books, cards, and calendars
- Slideshows
- Keyword shortcuts
- Unused keywords
- Last imported album (this album contains photos you most recently imported on a specific Mac)
- Faces tiles and Faces data
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Jun 8, 2015 3:07 AMby jayne_cobb,Thanks for the reply, it does seem to explain it.
Do we know why this is designed this way? I'm asking because I'm wondering if I should shift how I do things. When I am labelling people should I use keywords instead of faces?
If I have my laptop at my brothers house and want to show my nephew pictures of his cousins(my son and daughter) it would be handy to just have looked up the "face" of my son to show my nephew(his cousin). That is not an option, but perhaps if I label it as a keyword that makes more sense?
I just am wondering if this is a feature not yet available? (as its Photos is new) Its a bit confusing to me because while I can understand the facial recognition might be different from computer to computer the simple "label" of a face doesn't see that much different than a keyword so I am wondering if there is a reason Apple Designed it this way.
I'm hestitant to add keywords to all of my 50,000+ exisiting photos(granted they wouldn't all have faces) if we thought this might be a function in the future.
Long story short, just curious if anyone had an option on if the faces feature was gradually going to be eliminated and I should begin my migration to using keywords.
Cheers
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Jun 8, 2015 7:35 AMby markwmsn,We aren't really allowed to speculate in these forums on why Apple did something or when they might do something. Apple's existing help documents send mixed messages on Faces, but the passage I quoted seems to match observed fact. I remain optimistic that Apple will get Faces synchronization working at some point, but we'll have to wait for an announcement or release to see what happens.
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Jun 8, 2015 8:41 AMby R C-R,jayne_cobb wrote:
... while I can understand the facial recognition might be different from computer to computer the simple "label" of a face doesn't see that much different than a keyword ...
There is quite a bit more to facial recognition software than assigning keyword-like labels. For one thing, the face circles refer to specific areas of photos that contain face-like graphics structures, not to the entire photo like keywords do.
For another, an important use for this kind of software is, as the name implies, to recognize similarities in these structures that distinguish one person's face from another. As implemented by Apple, this is a heuristic process that requires user training (what you do when you identify a face as belonging to a particular person) & building a database containing that knowledge in a machine-usable form. Because this relies on analysis of many different photos in the library, it isn't a part of any single photo & can't be embedded in the photo files as metadata like keywords can.
What Apple might do in the future is unknown, but I think we can be pretty sure facial recognition will not be eliminated -- in fact, since Google & others are working on much more sophisticated forms of object recognition that can already do a pretty good job of for example distinguishing a dog from another animal (& even make a good guess at which breed it is!) it is a good bet that Apple is doing the same thing.
