I am very disappointed after switching from Picasa (on my old Windows computer) to iPhoto (on my new Mac). iPhoto detects only 50% of all the faces but Picasa over 80%! I have tested it with 6000 photos. Can I still set preferences somewhere, for example increasing sensitivity or similar?
Thanks!
PS: It's possible to import faces from Picasa to iPhoto? I have no desire to put hundreds of faces by hand...
I also know that Picasa is available on the Mac, but I want to use Aperture, and the advice appears to be that you can't really share photo libraries.
Like many people, I guess, I have spent a lot of time identifying faces in my Picasa library on the PC, and now I want to move over to Mac - but I don't want to spend the same time again identifying all of the faces.
I know that the face information is available in Picasa - central database for names and hash values, rectangle info and name lookup values stored in a file in each directory. If iPhoto / Aperture stores the rectangle / lookup info in EXIF on each photo, and the central database stores the actual names - then it must be possible to write a conversion routine.
So the big question is - has anyone out there already written one, or found one that is already known to work?
I know that there's no agreed standard, and I know that there's nothing from either iPhoto or Picasa that's going to do this, but I keep hoping that someone has written a migration routine - to save me the effort of writing one!
Can anyone confirm if the iPhoto database is open? it may not be the preferred method for making updates, but if there's a published spec for the database and a mechanism for updating it, then there should be a way forward.
One option I have considered to avoid using the database is to manually name a single instance of each known face in my library - this will generate the iPhoto lookup ID in the database - and also in the EXIF data for that photo.
I could then map that ID to the Picasa generated ID, and then
all I have to do is take the face information from the Picasa INI file, translate from Picasa to iPhoto ID, and encode the rectangle and ID information in the iPhoto EXIF data.
Would that work? it probably wouldn't work as a commercial offering, because it's expecting the user to do a lot to get things started, but it looks like it should work.
So - if I can come up with this algorithm for something that many people want, surely someone else has also considered it - and if they are a betterand more focussed developer than me, perhaps it's already written and tested. Somewhere.