Discarding Un-Named Faces

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Level 2

177 points

Discarding Un-Named Faces

I get the impression that faces that I have previously dismissed as unnamed keep returning as un-named suggestions. It could be an illusion as there must be well over a million faces in my Aperture library, but does anyone know if they keep returning until actually named? If so is there a way of permanently dismissing them so they never return as a suggestion? There are always more people in photographs who are either anonymous and forever so or I prefer not to name them. I would like not to have to deal with them more than once.

Macbook Pro Hi-Res (2008) + iBook G3 + iPod vid 60 GB + iPod 160GB + iPhone 3GS, Mac OS X (10.5.8), MBP 2.5GHz 4GB RAM + G3 500 MHz 384 MB RAM

Posted on Nov 17, 2010 7:00 PM

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Answer 1

Nov 18, 2010 7:34 AM in response to artistjoh

Either mark them "Not a face", or create a face named "Anonymous" (or whatever) and assign that name to them.

You can create multiple holding bins -- for example, "Bystander", "Unknown", and "Get Name". You can have Aperture put these next to each other by giving them a common prefix, such as "{underscore}", or "zz."

A million faces in your Library? Yikes.

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Answer 2

artistjoh Author

Level 2

177 points

Nov 18, 2010 5:11 PM in response to Kirby Krieger

Kirby Krieger wrote:
Either mark them "Not a face", or create a face named "Anonymous" (or whatever) and assign that name to them.

You can create multiple holding bins -- for example, "Bystander", "Unknown", and "Get Name". You can have Aperture put these next to each other by giving them a common prefix, such as "{underscore}", or "zz."

This seems a logical way to deal with it. "Anon" can cover a lot of sins 🙂 I appreciate the suggestion.

A million faces in your Library? Yikes.

It is not so outlandish. I am sure many people here have many many more. Just think about it. If you shoot 200 images in an afternoon each with 20 people, even if it is the same 20 people, Aperture will still see that as 4,000 faces each of which need to be named, confirmed, or dismissed (hence a lack of desire to see any face a second time). It all adds up pretty quickly and it is quite easy for even comparatively small libraries to have large numbers of faces in them.

While the Faces feature has many limitations, though, and I didn't bother to use it until recently, having used it I love it as superb way to search for photographs. Keyword naming is okay but often one cannot remember a name and the visual sorting I find really useful.

Although you don't say so your answer implies that those same unnamed-but-dismissed photos do keep on returning. That seems such an obvious flaw in the system that I wonder why it hasn't occurred to Apple yet. Maybe it is because it is a system designed for iPhoto and many iPhoto users have tiny libraries and tend to only photograph people known to them so it didn't register as a problem there.

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Answer 3

macorin

Level 1

58 points

Nov 19, 2010 6:51 AM in response to artistjoh

Hi,

Faces in Aperture is one of those features which kind of makes you scratch your head. I have activated and deactivated it a number of times. In theory, I want to use it, but based on the issue you described so well, I have become too frustrated with keeping it active.

Kirby does make some good suggestions, but the feature is still a drain on processing power. For now I will stick with keywords, even with its own limitations, such as forgetting or not knowing the names of certain people. I figure, if I can't remember their name, or don't know who they are in the first place, do I really need to keyword them, or have Faces separate them? I also don't feel as though I need an "Anonymous" type group on my cork board, because again, I am using processing power to store and sort information that is utterly useless to me.

That said, I do think Faces is a cool feature. I'm sure I will activate (and deactivate) it many more times in the future. Perhaps the flaw in not dismissing unnamed faces should be reported to Apple via their feedback page. You can find it here:

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

Good luck,

Mac

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Answer 4

Nov 19, 2010 4:28 PM in response to macorin

Faces is very cool, very useful, and used to be an additional drain on your system on top of Aperture, which is a huge system resources user. It is worth noting, however, that since one of the recent updates (3.1?), Faces is not +that much+ of an additional drag on your system -- it seems to have been made much more well-behaved. I find no reason to not leave it on all the time -- in fact, I recommend using it -- it now works well.

There is some confusion in this thread which I'd like to see sorted out, even at the cost of spilling some ink. artistjoh refers at least twice to "dismissing a face". This is not precise enough for trouble-shooting -- there is no action (afaik) called "dismiss" in the Faces module. But let's step back and survey the lay of the land before we zoom in.

As I understand it, Faces creates a database of potential faces it detects (it does this mostly behind the scenes). Each record in this database is an image detail that could be a face. Aperture initially refers to each of these records as an "Unnamed Face". Every time images are added to Aperture, Aperture analyses them for faces and adds a record for each one it detects to its big Faces database. They are shown as such in the various Faces views.

The choices the user has for each Unnamed Face is to either
- name it
- skip it, or
- tell Aperture it is not a face.

If an Unnamed Face is named, it becomes a Named Face and shows with all records matching this name on the Faces corkboard. (The corkboard background is optional, btw. I turned mine off the first time I saw it.) So the super-set is "Faces detected", a sub-set of that is "Faces named", and a sub-set of that is "Carl Young".

If the Unnamed Face is skipped, the record remains in the Faces database and is proposed for naming whenever Aperture feels it is a close match or is included in the selected images. Skipping an Unnamed Face does not remove it from the Faces database.

If the Unnamed Face is marked "Not a Face", it is removed from the Faces database and will never again be presented to the user for identification. Note that the "Name" and "Skip" options show on the Unnamed Face. The user must right-click an Unnamed Face to bring up the "Not a face" option.

Here is a screen-shot showing the three options:

Faces is, imho, well thought-out and presented. The reason to use an "Anonymous" name/marker is to retain records in the Faces database for which one does not have a name and will not have a name. Giving them the name "Anonymous" means that Aperture will not keep presenting them to be named. Likewise, a "_Name Later" name/marker is useful for grouping faces which one wants to name but doesn't have the name on hand.

The OP should note that "Not a face" is the function s/he is looking for -- it should be used not only for things which Aperture proposes as a face which are, in fact, not faces, but also for faces Aperture proposes but which one does not want to keep in the Faces database. In short, (afaict) there is no flaw here.

Message was edited by: Kirby Krieger to add screen-shot.

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Answer 5

Nov 19, 2010 4:20 PM in response to artistjoh

artistjoh wrote:
Although you don't say so your answer implies that those same unnamed-but-dismissed photos do keep on returning. That seems such an obvious flaw in the system that I wonder why it hasn't occurred to Apple yet. Maybe it is because it is a system designed for iPhoto and many iPhoto users have tiny libraries and tend to only photograph people known to them so it didn't register as a problem there.

artistjoh -- please see my long reply to macorin further down-thread. As I understand it, the Faces system works well and is not flawed in the way you think it is.

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Answer 6

artistjoh Author

Level 2

177 points

Nov 19, 2010 11:57 PM in response to Kirby Krieger

Kirby,
You belong on my Christmas card list. I understand the time involved in long and detailed replies and so appreciate your help.

I was using 'dismiss' to include 'skip' but also simply for hitting the 'x' in the top left corner of the face box when using the naming feature but not on the corkboard view. This also gets rid of the suggestion but as I suspected and you have confirmed with the reason why, that face is likely to return as a suggestion another time.

I did not know about the control click to produce a 'not a face' option which removes that suggestion from the database. Unfortunately I have discovered that it only works in the corkboard view and not when clicking the Name icon when looking at an image at other times. I am far more likely to be applying names when previewing images than actually in the Faces page. That is because I am most likely to name a face when applying other metadata. I also prefer it because when in the Faces page only the face itself is shown and there are many times when I am not sure who the person is and would like to look at the entire photo to get context but5 I have found no way of doing that. When naming in preview view I can see the entire photo and find it much easier to correctly identify people.

While I love the visual search options afforded by Faces I do find it an incredibly laborious process. It seems to me it has a less than 10% success rate at identifying faces unless it is a straight on head shot. It amuses me how it will identify a murky shadowy face in the background and yet totally miss the large well lit face in the foreground if it is 3/4 view or profile. It also seems to struggle to recognize black people and is much better with Asian and white people. It also often identifies wheels, folds of clothing etc as faces when a human would never make that mistake so while I have come to love it and find it useful I am still often frustrated by the limitations of it.

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