Iphoto 11 -How to turn off faces?

You may not have had problems with Faces but others have, and I am one of them.

I have had iPhoto crash with nothing but Faces spinning and sucking CPU many times. More than once such crashes caused the library to report "inconsistencies" on reopening and needing to rebuild over an extended period of time.

It is rather irritating to have a (useful to some) feature shoved down everyone's throat and not having the ability to turn it off. I do agree with you on the value of iPhoto being its decent integration with other things, and FaceBook, Flickr, etc. (Though I have seen many flickr photos duplicated as "imported from flickr" after an iPhoto crash led to some flickr sync oart of the database being messed up.)

Imran

Very simple- in fact trivial - never use a program that forces you to use any feature you do not want - you have free choice - use it

LN

If you simply do not want iPhoto to bother you with the "unamed" popups whenever you double-click a photo to view it up close or to edit it, there is an easy solution. In the right-sidebar that appears when you click on the "Info" icon in the lower right, there is a "Faces" editing tool below the Title, rating and description section and above the Keyword section. When that editing tool is expanded, the popups appear. But as soon as you close it (clicking the triangle "arrow" at the right end of the tool bar) the popups go away.

Solved my problem.

Am I the only one who thinks that having a "feature" no one really needs or may not want and that is by default, NON-NEGOTIABLE as far as being able to turn off, a bit unsettling?

I found this thread after trying to load several hundred photos (and being bogged down) and found that iPhoto was trying to "tag" all the Faces. When I went into the Faces pane to apply "manomoab's" solution, I discovered there were over 15,000 "unnamed faces" in my Library. And I can only delete 3 at a time.

Hecka'va job there, Apple! 😠

If that unsettles you there are two options:

1. Upgrade to Aperture. Among its many extra options is the ability to turn off faces. Pay more, get more options.

or

2. Use some other app entirely, or even just use folders in the Finder. iPhoto is not compulsory.

Thanks for a response that added no value to the discussion nor provided a solution. Much easier not to waste others' time if you do not have a real solution to a problem. Thanks.

there is one and onloy one solution - use a different program -- it is no possible to turn faces off if you use iPhoto

Sorry that you do not like the answer - but that is the answer

and a very trivial answer - attaciing the meswsanger does not schange the fract that yu can no turn faces off

have a nice day

LN

Start of solution:

I did some digging in the prefs of iPhoto and found out the following. This is how you can disable (turn off) Face detection, without deleting faces found so far (just in case you want to restart processing at another time):

1. Quit iPhoto

2. Open Terminal Application (Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app)

3. Type the following (exactly as is):

defaults write com.apple.iPhoto PKFaceDetectionEnabled 0

(then return)

4. - Start iPhoto - Faces stops getting on your nerves...

If you ever need to re-enable faces, just do the same again and replace the 0 with 1.

Greetings,

lopezio

<Edited By Host>

You, sir, are my hero.

As someone whose efforts have been recognised by - at least - some 11,600 people, I'm comfortable enough with my contribution to the forum to ignore this.

I hope your solution works, great if it does - though I believe you should warn people to back up first. Your other advice I'll pay attention to after you've been around here a little longer. Look forward to your other contributions.

<Edited By Host>

Lopezio, You are really my hero!!! My computer has been so slow for more than a year now. I've had a new hard drive installed then doubled my memory trying to fix the problem. Still my computer has run and run and run, overheated, shut down, I've had three new batteries in a year and with your simple suggestion all my problems are fixed. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you. I was really getting bummed out about the next step which was to buy a new computer. You're a genius!! Have I said enough???

lopezio - I don't care how long you've been here. Your solution works and that's all that matters. Truly.

THANK YOU!!!

Lopezio - I have tried and tried your solution but Faces is still in the menu 😟 Please help?? I am opening the terminal box where i copy and paste or type the command then press enter and nothing... still the same when i re-open iphotos 😟

xxCASxx wrote:

Lopezio - I have tried and tried your solution but Faces is still in the menu 😟 Please help?? I am opening the terminal box where i copy and paste or type the command then press enter and nothing... still the same when i re-open iphotos 😟

Hi,

The prefs change does not remove the Faces tab on the left. It Just disables further face detection (the wheel stops turining in the Faces tab), thus saving battery life on laptops and reducing processor usage.

There is no special need for a backup before this operation. It does not change anything in the Libraries and is revertible.

Only note of caution: I tested on iPhoto 9.5.1. It presumably works on 9.x.x too, but there is no warranty that it will work on older or newer versions.

HNY everyone,

Regards,

lopezio

Thank you so much lopezio! It really helped!

Hope someone can tell Apple that the faces-recognition function is just a n n o y i n g.