Faces vs Keywords - or both?

Depends

I like faces and using keywords for what/why (faces for who, places for where and the camera EXIF data for when) so I have who, what, when, where and why for each photo - then searching and/or smart albums will grab the photos I want very quickly

Terrance prefers keywords to faces - I disagree but either way works - for me faces while not perfect makes the Who element easier

As to searching - it makes no difference - the difference is in getting the information coded into the photos.

LN

Personally I prefer keywords. For a start, they are portable. They can be written to the photo of you export it. They are a Standard, and there is a place in the IPTC metadata for keywords. Faces are not standard. No other app will understand iPhoto's Faces data and vice versa. There is no place in the metadata for Faces information. Faces recognised on iPhoto will not be respected by Picasa online for instance, and so on. In fact, even Apple's own Aperture has n o understanding of them.

All of which is not to say that Faces are useless. They give you another way to search and categorise your Library and if you enjoy that, by all means use it. It's quite possible that if I had not

a; Previously created and applied a keywording system to my 20k image library
b: a long standing interest in keeping my data portable

that I would have adopted Faces.

Of course, you can use the Faces results to keyword pics with a persons name if you want to. Not so interesting for me I confess.

FWIW: My keywording system:

I keyword on a
Who
What
Where basis (The When is in the photos's Exif metadata). I also rate the pics on a 1 - 5 star basis.

Using this system I can find pretty much find any pic in my 20k library in a couple of seconds.

So, for example, I have a batch of pics titled 'Seattle 08' and a typical keywording might include: John, Anne, Landscape, mountain, trees, snow. With a rating included it's so very easy to find the best pics we took at Mount Rainier.

File -> New Smart Album
set it to 'All"
title contains Seattle
keyword is mountain
keyword is snow
rating is 5 stars

Or, want a chronological album of John from birth to today?

New Smart Album
Keyword is John
Set the View options to Sort By Date Ascending

Want only the best pics?
add Rating is greater than 4 stars

The best thing about this system is that it's dynamic. If I add 50 more pics of John to the Library tomorrow, as I keyword and rate them they are added to the Smart Album.

Keywording takes time to set up, there's no doubt about it. I use Keyword Manager as it's much more powerful than the inbuilt system, and adds the possibility of nested keywords. So, for instance, if I add John to a photo it also adds 'Family'. Now I can add many keywords to a pic quickly.

In the end, organisation is about finding the pics. The point is to make locating that pic or batch of pics findable fast. This system works for me.

Note that in that system you could easily replace the keyword for the person with their Face in a Smart Album.

Regards

TD

I found that using faces is a very quick way to identify family members in new photos as I bring them into iphoto.

Since I started my library before faces, I also use and like keywords. To make this easy to administer; I first use faces to identify a family member. I then select all the new photos that faces matched, and then apply that persons name to all the new photos at once.

The end result is that I can find them easily in an Iphoto search, and each of the photos is metatagged as well should I export the photo to another application.

Cranix

I have iPhoto 09 and Aperture. We have been collecting photos over the past 10 years and have been sloppy about organization. As of now everything is in Aperture. I believe all (if not most) my pics are in jpg. I wanted to start building a workflow that I could use against my current photos and going forward. As part of the workflow can I:

a. move my pics to iPhoto 09
b. run faces and places against all the images
c. export back to Aperture with the metadata intact

If so, has anybody documented the steps? I have read that it is not as straight forward when exporting to iPhoto. I was also thinking of building an automator script.

Thanks.
Joe

I'm not sure it's worth the effort.

You can move your Pics to iPhoto 09 using the Export option in Aperture and then importing to iPhoto.

There is no way to automate Faces and Places. This involves you examining each pic in turn and tagging it with names and locations.

You cannot write the Faces data to the photographs. There is no standard for this kind of metadata and Aperture has no way to read it. You can keyword with iPhoto, but then you can keyword with Aperture too.

You can do Places data in iPhoto and write it back to the file on Export but then again you can geotag in Aperture too.

Then Export using the File -> Export option in iPhoto, Kind:jpeg and tick the boxes at Titles and Keywords and Places too. Then import to Aperture again.

Regards

TD

Terence, thanks for the answer. I guess I misunderstood iPhoto's faces and places capability. I thought you could id a face and it would run through your content finding all like faces. I haven't tried it on any scale ...just a few images to see how it works. Not a 100% accurate but maybe better than 50%. For me that is ok...it's a start at organizing.

If it does work that way then I think what you are telling me is the metadata is stored in iPhoto and not with the jpg file. If this is the case then I get it...not worth moving things back and forth unless I want to use iPhoto as my last step for content management.

or

Is the issue with iPhoto's transfer/compatability with Aperture and the handling of jpg. I would think that Aperture would import 'as is' without stripping out metadata. Is this a exif vs. xml issue ie:I should be using jpeg2k?

Your insight is appreciated.

You cannot write the Faces data to the photographs. There is no standard for this kind of metadata and Aperture has no way to read it. You can keyword with iPhoto, but then you can keyword with Aperture too.

But you can use "faces" to identify people, open their "face" and then assign their keyword very easily

LN

I thought you could id a face and it would run through your content finding all like faces.

That's how it works, but you have to confirm each instance of each face.

If it does work that way then I think what you are telling me is the metadata is stored in iPhoto and not with the jpg fiLe

Yes, just like Aperture, new metadata is not written to the file until it is exported. But that's not the problem... The problem is there is nowhere to write the Faces data to. There is no heading in either the Exif or IPTC to write to, and consequently no way for Aperture to read it from.

In other words the only place you can transport Faces data is to another iPhoto Library and the only way to do that is with iPhoto Library Manager.

Regards

TD

Thanks Terence. That makes sense.

Do you think that a process that begins with the ingest in Aperture, export to jpg and then import into iPhoto, run Faces and Places and use iPhoto to manage content would work? Understand that any time I need to move it back to Aperture I would have to handle as an exception but that is not often for me.

What a lot of work for those features, is what I would say. Hang on. There's going to be an Aperture 3 at some point in the future...

But yes, it would work.

Regards

TD

Thanks Terence.
I've just retired so no rush...I'll wait for Aperture 3.
Joe

Terence,
If you are still there... I had been looking at third party that just did facial recog (not places). The workflow would be easier than taking it back and forth from iPhoto since the software handles jpg directly. What I don't know (and I suspect you can help me formulate the question) is how should the 3rd party software store the metadata such that Aperture would understand it later?

As Aperture

A: doesn't support Faces currently
B: there is no standard format to store or share Faces metadata
C: we therefore have no idea what, if any, system Aperture will use.

Regards

TD

Terence, thanks for the quick reply.

Sorry, I wasn't very clear. Here is what I am thinking:

First, the facial recog workflow is outside of the Aperture workflow.

Prereq would be a 3rd party facial recog software that can handle tif, jpg, psd and raw formats.

As an example for tif, it would store the facial information in the form of a keyword like: dad, peter, etc. The keyword would be placed into the tif app1 or similar area. This is where I'm thinking the keywords for Aperture are stored. When you open Aperture to look at the image it sees the keyword you have added from the third party process. No import/export required.

Two things (at least) I don't understand: is Aperture's keyword in the app1 area (if so, then I have the first part done). Second item is how to get access to the files in the Aperture Library without opening Aperture. I know that Aperture has an 'external image editor' in preferences but I don't think that is what I need.

Update, I figured out how to get access to the files by using "show package contents" with a control click.