Faces is missing so many faces... any way to get it to rescan?

I'm wondering the same thing. I've spent lots of time tagging faces iPhoto found after the first 6+ hour scan, but now I'm discovering entire "rolls" of pictures that don't have any of the faces even recognized as being faces.

It's a little tedious to go through and draw squares around the faces AND identify them. It seems odd because these are not murky pictures or anything - lots of well lit, posed, faces to the camera photos aren't having the faces "seen" by the program. Not talking about the program identifying who the face belongs to, but identifying that there is a face there at all.

I've been impressed at iPhoto's ability to pick up tiny, out of focus and even very blurry faces in photos and not only identify them as faces, but also identify who they belong to, so it's all the more baffling when it doesn't seem to even "see" a face in a nice, clear, posed photo.

I'd love to be able to rescan the library without losing the data I've already tagged.

I’ve yet to find a way to rescan the Library without losing all previous work, I’m afraid.

To force Faces to rescan your Library:

Note You will lose any work you’ve already done with Faces. This is to return to the very beginning.

Quit iPhoto.

Go to your Pictures Folder (or where ever you have your Library) and find the iPhoto Library there.

Right Click on it, and from the resulting menu select ‘Show Package Contents’. A Finder window will open and the Library will be exposed.

Find the following files:

face_blob.db
face.db

and move them to the trash.

Make no other changes.

Restart iPhoto.


Regards

TD

i tried this. no luck. i just get that flippin' corkboard with the yellow stickie and stock photo on it. i'm really NOT impressed with iPhoto 09 so far. it crashes constantly and faces/places doesn't work at all. i had no problems with 08

Have you gone into your photos Brian after the scan? Checkout the video tutorial that pops up when iPhoto first starts. This is highly recommended.

After your Mac has scanned all you need to do is to go to a picture, click the FACE button in the bottom left of iPhoto and it will suggest a face which you then name. You should then be able to go on and identify more faces.

Good luck. 🙂

the problem i'm having is that after deleting those files iphoto didn't bother to rescan. it simply did nothing 😟

Brian

Try also trash the com.apple.iPhoto.plist file from the HD/Users/ Your Name / library / preferences folder. (Remember you'll need to reset your User options afterwards. These include minor settings like the window colour and so on. Note: If you've moved your library you'll need to point iPhoto at it again.)

Regards

TD

Indyhouse,

I completely agree. This is not ready for release. I'm having the same issues. The software hasn't recognized an image as a face yet - I'm having to drag boxes around everyone. Even then it won't match them up to anyone else. It spent hours scanning everything, but for what?

Why, oh why did I upgrade? I could have used that $99.00 for a Wii Fit or something.

Make sure they're aware of the issues...

http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphoto.html

After the "issues" with iweb etc in 08 i thought both me and apple would have learnt about releasing a product prematurely but we did not, ilife '09 is buggy and not really up to what we where promised so next year i shall hold on until half way through the year i am just so annoyed about faces and how it has been touted even faces that i have tagged its forgot and then placing tags at bottom left of alot of pictures miles away from face :S

Message was edited by: oney001

Message was edited by: oney001

I just iPhoto 09 and found myself spending more time drawing squares around the faces and naming them than anything else. I've almost manually labeled every person in my iphoto library...so far only one person (myself) iPhoto 09 started to recognized.

I also notice, in none of my faces categories, do I have any pictures under " __ may also be in the photos below".

Yea, my iphoto 09 hasn't been able to recognize a face and automatically put a white box around it except for 3 or 4 in the 56 face photo's I have gone through so far.

Ah, this is my thread!

I just spent half an hour reading posts here, looking for people reporting the same lame experience I've had. And here you are. I am also experiencing the problems described in this thread. I'd like to add a concern to the ones already mentioned:

Faces has completely stopped making suggestions.

For instance, my wife is fond of self-portraits. Every now and then she'll take a few hundred pictures of herself for kicks (and mine). These sets of photos tend to be extremely similar — dozens of nearly identical pictures of her pretty face that haven't been even been identified as faces, let alone as her. Yet the "Kim may also be in the photos below" section is empty. Not one suggestion!

I can completely expected the facial recognition feature to fail with many lower-quality pictures, and I would certainly have forgiven that. Low contrast lighting, countless possible angles, foreground obstructions and many other variables make facial recognition an incredible programming challenge.

But I did not expect this feature to fail to recognize many good quality pictures! And I find it hard to forgive the iPhoto development team for this. There's a (really) big difference between failing with poor input and failing with good input. It's sloppy and embarrassing and yet another reason why I'm not exactly tripping over myself to recommend Macs to my PC-using friends.

Sigh.

To add insult to injury (so to speak), Faces recognizes obscure, tiny shapes in the background as a face, yet ignores large easy to recognize and nearly identical images to the ones that were 'trained' already. I wouldn't mind if the box showed up as an unidentified face, but it doesn't even add the box, thus I have to click 'unidentified' face and resize the box (very time consuming).
It also (somehow) changed my daughters name in dozens of images to another name.
I wonder if there is a commonality to the problems, such as image size, (some were taken with a 4MP camera while others with a 1MP camera phone and a few were e-mailed and resized by the sender's e-mail program.
I expect any new product to be buggy in it's first public version, but one would think that this would have been tested (extensively) before release. I imagine Faces is a feature that many would use in deciding whether to upgrade, or not.

I have been getting about a 60% "hit rate" on detecting faces in my photos. Recognising who the face belongs to is about 40% of the faces detected...not too great I suppose. As for manually selecting faces, just place the unedited / un-resized "add missing face" box over the person, no point in resizing it as iPhoto will not use manually selected faces to recognise other photos (see the apple support article : http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3427 ) the note near the end of the support article says: *Note: Only faces that have been automatically detected in your photo library will help iPhoto match faces. Manually identified faces will not aid iPhoto's face-matching ability.*
so being overly precise with you own additions to the faces database is pointless, just use it to identify the person rather than the face and move on. Hopefully this is an issue that will be addressed by Apple as it defeats the purpose of "faces".