Aperature 3 - faces not detected on files imported

The face recognition is a learning algorithm, Aperture will (or should) learn to recognize the faces better, as you show more and more samples, correctly identified.

When you deleted the faces.db you removed all learning samples Aperture has seen sofar, and you will have to start over again to teach Aperture what the persons look like, that you want Aperture to be able to identify automatically. Just don't be impatient.

You can improve the recognition rate (slightly) by making sure that you only include correctly labelled faces and faces samples in good quality - don't include pictures of persons seen from the back, or with partially occluded faces, don't mix faces with and without sun glasses or goggles in the same faces stack.

However, the automatic face recognition algorithm is still in its infancy, IMHO. I have about 150 faces in my database, picked from 20000 images, and the recognition rate is not very convincing. Maybe 40% are recognized correctly at import, all others I have to label manually. And some recognition results are very surprising. The picture of the lioness that I use as my profile picture in this forum was suggested to me by Aperture in the "Faces" view with the question "is this Leonie?" 😁. So I decided to use as my profile picture.

How do I get aperature to recreate a new face.db file, ( could restore my old one through time machine)

Try to restore your old Faces.db from Time Machine, you need to rstore the "Faces" related parts in the Aperture Library package in the folders:

yourLibrary.aplibrary -> Database -> apdb- > Faces.db

and all subfolders of

yourLibrary.aplibrary -> Database -> Faces

Before you try any of that, however, make sure you have a working backup of your Aperture library!

It might be safer to rely on Aperture rebuilding a new, empty Faces.db file, and to start over again from scratch.

Regards

Léonie

Hello Chris,

Just to clairfy...when I import a new project (from camera) it is not recognizing any of the faces; it is recognizing the face; just not who it is. On the lower faces screen is the face with the form for me to complete and provide the name

That is the normal behaviour. But once you have imported enough images for the face recognition algorithm to be able to recognize a face, then you could click on one of stacks of faces on the corkboard, it will show you a list of similar faces in the film strip that it recognized as the same person. You can confirm the match if it is correct. As I said, with the faces I imported about 40% of these suggestions are o.k. Try it, and click on one of the faces stacks; when it opens, you will see a heading:

"xxx may also be in the images below". But you always will have to confirm these detections.

the file size is constant at 13kb...should this file size grow..when? mine never grew after three weeks of use.

This file is the textual description of the names of the faces, and the size does not depend on the number of images in your library, only on the number of persons you name. So the size of this file always should remain small, but the "Faces" subfolder should increase, for it contains previews of all the faces.

I'll be back later and answer the rest of your questions.

Regards

Léonie

Also I have read somewhere in a posting that there is a setting to scan faces on import...I see in general preferences there is a faces setting but nowhere do I see a setting about scanning faces on import. Does this really exists?

There used to be, initially. But it seemed to have vanished with Aperture 3.2.

Now you can Aperture only prevent from scanning on import by turning "Faces" off while importing.

Post back if you have more questions, or if I forgot to answer one 🙂