Importing Faces Data from Picasa to iPhoto or Aperture

There is no way to transfer Faces data from Picasa to iPhoto, Aperture or whatever. Or vice versa. There is simply no standard convention that makes this possible. They all work on a proprietary system. Nearest you get: use your Faces as a basis for keywords and write those to the files on export.

Regards

TD

You can transfer face data from iPhoto to Picasa via Phoshare app, which writes the iPhoto faces data to a standard format that Picasa can read. iPhoto however does not respect that standard, and the reverse direction is not currently possible.

Phoshare hasn't been updated in more than a year and I doubt it will even work with the latest versions of iPhoto. Again, there is no standard format for sharing faces. No one has agreed anything.

Phoshare does work with latest version of iPhoto. The faces are exported in Microsoft Photo Region Schema which Picasa can read. It's a published schema, but not a standard. It would be nice if there was more interoperability. Picasa does a bit better in matching faces, but much much better in correctly rejecting faces. With iPhoto, I had to pick a few photos out of dozens of suggestions, with Picasa, there were a few suggestions, and all were correct.

Are you sure it does? We've had a couple of threads on here saying that the 9.3+ updates broke it. Also the ability of iPhoto export to a Folder tree might make it moot. I agree that it would be nice if there was more interoperability, but I doubt there'll be a standard unless we see Adobe on board.

Here's what I did to automatically export all face tags as keywords. I used this great free tool called AVPicFaceXMPTagger to insert all the face tags as keywords into the IPTC and XMP headers of the image files. After running the tool in Windows I imported the photos to iPhoto. Now I can search for photos that contains one or more people easily.

Please mind that:

1. It took ~2 hours to go over my entire library of photos that contains ~20,000 images with 9,925 detected faces of 130 people.
2. This is not a perfect solution. Using keywords you can make OR search, not AND search. For example, searching for "Tim and Chris" will retrieve all photos of Tim, Chris as well as Tim and Chris.
3. The keywords do not completly replace the functionalities of face recognition tags, e.g. keywords do not show up under "Faces", the recognition engine needs tags to suggest new detections, etc.
4. The tool is a Windows EXE file so it will only help a Windows-Picasa to OS X-iPhoto migration.