Is there anyway to disable faces?

When you say

But now we have 1500 little jpgs in his iPhoto library, xxx_face files.

Do you mean in the iPhoto Window? Or in the Library in the Finder?

Regards

TD


R

Terence Devlin wrote:
When you say

But now we have 1500 little jpgs in his iPhoto library, xxx_face files.

Do you mean in the iPhoto Window? Or in the Library in the Finder?

I know they're in the Library in the Finder, it's the Faces database of thumbnails. I meant they are visible in iPhoto, in the Photos library, along with all his other pictures. After further research, I think they were added into the Photo Library by a library rebuild that added a bunch of Recovered pictures (though they are not in the Recovered album, I don't think). His iPhoto is all screwed up as a result of (in an earlier version) having messed around in the iPhoto Library folder using the Finder, as so many of my clients have done, which is why we rebuilt the library. I am soooo glad that Apple finally made the iPhoto Library folder into a package instead, so that people can't easily do that any more.

I asked - in the interest of absolute clarity -

Do you mean in the iPhoto Window? Or in the Library in the Finder?

From what you say I assume that this

I meant they are visible in iPhoto, in the Photos library, along with all his other pictures.

means the iPhoto Window.

If this is the case:

What you describe sounds like what occurs when someone either imports one library to another or tries to recover orphaned photos from a damaged Library package.

Frankly, from what you say, I think you would be best creating a new Library and starting over from scratch unless you have a back up from prior to this rebuild. Do you?

Regards

TD

From what you say I assume that this

I meant they are visible in iPhoto, in the Photos library, along with all his other pictures.

means the iPhoto Window.

If this is the case:

What you describe sounds like what occurs when someone either imports one library to another or tries to recover orphaned photos from a damaged Library package.

Frankly, from what you say, I think you would be best creating a new Library and starting over from scratch unless you have a back up from prior to this rebuild. Do you?

Yes, I did mean visible IN IPHOTO in the iPhoto Photos window. And yes, the faces thumbs appeared when recovering a damaged library. And yes, because of the faces thumbs we've gone to the oldest (pre-Faces) backup he has, and we're laboriously cleaning out the dupes and missing pictures. He's got a lot of time invested in keywords and descriptions, so I can't start from scratch.

Thanks for your replies, and I think it's time to let this thread continue on its original subject.

You could try use iPhoto Library Manager on that old library:

Download iPhoto Library Manager and use its rebuild function. This will create a new library based on data in the albumdata.xml file. Not everything will be brought over - no slideshows, books or calendars, for instance - but it should get all your albums and keywords back.

Because this process creates an entirely new library and leaves your old one untouched, it is non-destructive, and if you're not happy with the results you can simply return to your old one.

Regards

TD

TD

Your responses are unhelpful and patronising, you'd be better off, as we would, if you didn't bother answering if that's all you can manage.

Yes I have informed Apple and I came here to find out if I was the only one suffering or if I'd missed a trick somewhere. It's pretty obviously a major grumble.

Seems like the developers assumed their feature was so wonderful they couldn't imagine anyone not wanting to use it.

I'll have to wait for a a future upgrade as hacking code isn't what I'm good at, and it's not what I bought a "computer for the rest of us" for either.

In the mean time I'll grit my teeth and suffer it.

Cheers

Neil

Neil,
Great post.
Thank you

Stephen

Having just updated iPhoto, I run 30 separate Libraries, all indexed by date. Each time i open one of these i get this unconstructive Faces scanning. And each time i try to use the Media Inspector to put pictures into iWeb the column of pics flicks back up to the top ... I keep having a tug of war between where I want the pictures to be, and where iPhoto's desperation for completing its Faces routine wants the pictures to be. Yup, I want my own choices as to how I organise my photos in iPhoto. MAny of my libraries do not have ant faces in them, so it is a waste of CPU time and RAM for this to be happening with these. We are 'allowed' to organise our photos in a lot of different ways... why can we not have this as just one way to view our collections, just as we can organise manually, or by date, or whatever. Why anyone should get so enthusiastic as Apple does about 'Faces' passes me by completely.

You know I completely agree with you. I don’t use the feature myself. But posting here is pointless. The people who can make a change in this are not here. You need to let the developers know what you want and the route for that is

iPhoto menu -> Provide iPhoto Feedback

Regards

TD

I wish you were not so patronising in many of your responses. The forums allow a strength of feeling to be demonstrated... I have already posted to Apple, in exactly the same terms as here, (before posting here, as it happens), plus a bit more... but when I see your initials below several replies to comments about 'Faces' that more or less say to the other respondent "Well, that's the way it is", I wonder why you bother with those replies. What do you think a forum is for? It is for raising and developing issues, and if someone incidentally can furnish a solution, then furnishing one. But because of all the comments here we can see that a decision by Apple to make 'Faces' non-optional is causing a level of interference with many peoples' working that is really totally unwarranted. Also, people do not then feel 'alone' with their problems.

The point of my reply was to encourage you to let Apple know, and had you mentioned that you had, I would have not replied at all.

Regards

TD

Faces is cool but I guess I am not the only one that is having my computer bogged down by what seems to be faces. It has become very slow using iPhoto Ever since I started identifying faces. I have 25,000 pix with 8,800 left unidentified in faces. Once I get the all identified is iPhoto apt to speed up again? Many of the faces are ones that I only have one photo of and don't have a clue who it is as it may be in a group shot. Any suggestion what to do with that type of face?

BTW, you can achieve the same result simply by locking those files. There’s no need to go into the >>Terminal

Was this in reference to the faces.db and the faces_blob.db? I locked both of those in hopes of disabling faces but then iPhoto wouldn't launch because of a "iPhoto database is locked" error.

Thanks,

Mace

This seems to have changed in one of the recent updates.

However, be aware that locking these files - using the Terminal or anything else - will not stop Faces from scanning. It will still want to do the initial scan, and keep trying until it does. It will still scan on each import. All it will do is mean that you cannot name faces. You can achieve exactly the same result by... not naming faces.

Regards

TD

I see it's not only me. I just upgraded to iPhoto '09 today and am now sitting through 72 minutes of waiting while iPhoto sifts through my library. I cannot for the life of me understand why Apple would not have made this OPTIONAL at the first launch of the software, much the way they made the GPS feature optional. I don't look at photos by faces/people...i look at them by dates and places. I assume many do as well. Grouping faces together is just silly in my opinion. Perhaps others like it. But that's the point; it should be an option, not forced upon the masses. If given the option, I absolutely would have clicked "no" as I have no need for it. Yet, here I sit...with 70 minutes to go.

Yes. I've already left feedback with Apple.