Faces vs Keywords - or both?

Why not just add keywords in Aperture?

No matter what app you use you will need to tell it that yes, this is a photo of Me. Like iPhoto it will make further suggestions and then you will have to say, yup, that's me or no it's not.

Then when you've done all that for every pic you will add a Keyword - Me - to all those pics.

Just adding the Keyword in Aperture will be faster.

Regards

TD

Terence, thanks again for your explanations.

Let's say I have a 5 thousand photos (Not unlike the average Joe with a digital SLR). Let's also assume that I never have assigned keywords to any of these photos accumulated over the last few years (other than that inserted by the camera: date, time, gps, lens type, etc).

Under Aperture I would need to assign a keyword like 'Dad' to every photo with dad in the picture. Not all my 'dad' pictures are in the same folder/project or date. I would need to review every picture and assign the keyword 'dad' to all those photos one at a time. For thousand photos this would take me hours of work. Albeit, the data might be better but that is another discussion.

My thought is to use the program to sort through the picture library outside the Aperture workflow. The facial program would present a picture, I would assign it a keyword (in this case 'dad') and it would find the rest of the pictures that had 'dad' in them, automatically assign the keyword for me and present the most popular first so I don't have to worry about the 'long tail' issue. I could go through thousands of photos in a few minutes and assign keywords based on the facial matching.

Joe, yes, that's the dream but that's not how it works in actual practise.

Facial Recognition is slow, inaccurate. It will offer you pics that it thInks are Dad but aren't. It will miss a lot of pics that have Dad in them.

You will go through thousands of pics in a few weeks not minutes. It will save you no time at all.

Plus: If the pics are already imported to Aperture then keywords added to the file afterwards will not be read by Aperture. You would have to do this on files before they are added to Aperture.

Bluntly setting up a keyword system is slow. But examining each photo in turn will mean that you can add a richer set of keywords than just Dad. Read the Aperture manual on Keywording.

Regards

TD

Terence, Thanks for the input.

100% agree with the accuracy issue of iPhoto and the faces and places feature. I was suprised by how many 'straight forward' photo's were mis-catagorized. I was looking at using a more 'industrial strength' facial recognition program. Something used in law enforcement where the accuracy is considerably better. Still drawbacks but the accuracy could be as much as 95% for qualified content (good angle, right amount of light, etc). The composition of most of the photos I have of people would be considered of good quality for a facial recognition program.

Regarding your comments on the workflow 'keywords added to the file afterwards..." I'm not certain why that would be the case. Using this example:

+Photo is in the Aperture library already.+
+No keywords/metadata have been added by the Aperture user+

If the facial recognition program is adding keywords to the jpg file, in a jpg format, in the Aperture library, then it seems like it would be readable next time you opened Aperture to look at the photo or when you exported the photo...its all jpg. Are you saying that the Aperture format is not really jpg and its proprietary? If so, then I understand your point.

Thanks again for your insight.

Hmmm

Something used in law enforcement where the accuracy is considerably better. Still drawbacks but the accuracy could be as much as 95% for qualified content...

I'm not so sure that Law Enforcement has software anywhere remotely near that level of accuracy outside of a movie. But there you go. Facial Recognition is in its infancy as a consumer technology. Call back in 15 years 😉

If the facial recognition program is adding keywords to the jpg file, in a jpg format, in the Aperture library, then it seems like it would be readable next time you opened Aperture to look at the photo

Aperture scans a photo for metadata on import. Anything added after to to the file that's not added by Aperture or via Aperture is not known about. Can you imagine how long it would take to open a Library if each image had to be rescanned for new data every time?

Regards

TD