Aperture 3.5 face recognition bug

I do, and several others. These problems are new since upgrading to Mavericks and Aperture 3.5:

1. In a photo with a detected face and an Aperture guess, there appears the guessed name and a check mark and an x. However, when I hover over the marks, I often see a hand instead of a pointer. I cannot effectively click either (although pressing Enter selects the one highlighted). Sometimes if I click three to four times, the name will highlight and I can correct it.

2. In split view, with Name selected, pressing the right arrow no longer goes to the next photo. Dragging the selected photo doesn't work either.

3. In a photo with about 30 people, in Viewer, with Name selected, the program continually cycled from one face to the next--acted like it was checking for missing faces.

I am very concerned about these issues as they reflect similar issues which caused me to move from iPhoto to Aperture about a year ago--the database is unstable.

Reported to Apple

On an existing photo with two faces on it, no faces are identified. Added two faces. Go to next photo. Go back to this photo--no faces identified.

Also experiencing the same issues. I have tried to repeatedly re-align the detected face without success. I have also noticed difficulty hitting the X if I disagree with the auto-recognition. It doesn't want to respond at all.

The face recognition thing is not new. I have been fighting this bug for months. It only seems to efffect certain pictures but have never been able to figure out the pattern. In addition to moving off the face, sometimes the face rectangle gets almost as big as the photo.

For me the face rectangle resizing was happening every so often before the 3.5 upgrade, but I've just spent several days adding faces to photos only to find that they have all skewed off position since 'upgrading' to 3.5. What's even more disconcerting is that some photos have face boxes that were not assigned to the photo.

As my reason for upgrading to 3.5 was the promise of bug fixes, this is a pretty major disappointment and one that makes me reluctant to process any more photos... What happens if/when they fix the issue photos assigned faces since the bug are all skewed the other way???

Apple please fix this!

Have you looked at locations? it appears that most of my locations info is garbage. I have stopped work on my my aperture project - completely.

I've the same issue here, most of the faces are misaligned since the upgrade to the latest Aperture release.

Hoping Apple is working to fix that.

I think Dan Conners above has provided an excellent description of the Faces problem. I have seen all of them and I think most have existed for some time - certainly in my case, more that a year! Hope Apple provides some fixes soon.

Since the upgrade to Maverick/Aperture 3.5, I have the same problem as reported by the O.P.

For me it only happens for pictures that have been cropped: Aperture simply displays the faces frame at the wrong position when the picture is cropped... Try to remove the crop effect: the faces frames are now positioned correctly over the faces. This misalignment occurs wether the faces were automatically detected or manually added.

Please Apple, fix this !! It looks like it is just a visual bug (I don't think the database is unstable as Don connors), but it is really annoying. As soon as you have more than 5 people in the picture, it is impossible to do anything with the faces in the picture (edition, etc.).

garz75 Just rebuilt my Aperture library and did some more work with Face Recognition. For me, the face allignment problem appears to occurr randomly whether or not the picture is cropped. In a couple of examples, I cropped and streightened pictures already misalligned, deleted the misalligned faces rectangles and reassigned them. When I returned to the pictures, they were still misalligned in very much the same way as before. I think there must be a reason causing this but for me, cropping isn't it. And I agree with you looking at the pictures in faces view misallignment is not apparent. YES, APPLE please fix this problem!!!

I use my Aperture database in both Aperture and iPhoto: in iPhoto, The faces are aligned correctly. Actually I use now iPhoto for the faces edition... Going back and forth between the 2 applications is a workaround...

garz75 Thank you for he iPhoto input. After installing OS X v10.9 and Aperture v3.5. My Aperture library size increased from abt 320gb to 487.96mb. Have not been able to open this library in iPhoto, even when it was 320gb. Diagnostics goes to permissions. When I try to run permissions, in abt 2 min, get beach ball and message iPhoto is not responding. With all the problems being reported, I am really nervious about "pushing it". Ideas?

Thank you again for your input.

jsprout3: after upgrading OSX and aperture, I did not see my library increase in size notably... According to the info panel on my timeMachine backups:

Before upgrade:

Size: 40,487,097,262 bytes (40.58 GB on disk)

Version: iPhoto Library 9.4.3

After upgrade:

Size: 40,545,416,641 bytes (40.64 GB on disk)

Version: iPhoto Library 9.5

As you can see its format is "iPhoto", may be that what makes the difference with you. When I create a library with Aperture, its version says "Aperture Library 3.5"... I have no idea what the differences are...

I agree you should not push it, and wait for Apple to release some fixes to Aperture... Who said "never upgrade your software when the new major version comes out, always wait for the next point release"? A wise man I guess ;-) we upgraded and now we are in trouble...

Sorry I could not help...

garz75 Again, thank you for your input. Guess when new software is released, I "just gotta be first". Normally, for me, it has worked well in the past. Based on input I'm seeing from others, I am one of the lucky ones! Right now, I think I will hurry up and wait for some fixes. Have a great day,

Reporting on interaction with Apple. As I mentioned, I reported the problem to Apple. I was contacted on 11/3 by a gentleman at Apple asking for more details and a small sample. I described the problem and sent in two photos: in one the faces were offset. In the other, adding a name did not stick (when you went back to the photo the name was not there). I only submitted two photos due to file size limits.

My last comment was: "I really just need to know if this is repairable or I just need to give it up."

Apple's reply on Nov 4: "Thank you for the details. I will pass this to engineering. If we feel we can recover it, I'll let you know."

That reply was significantly less of a commitment than I had hoped for. So iPhoto's database got contaminated, I ebuilt it in Aperture, and now Aperture is contaminated. I decided to rethink my logic that brought me to these two products in the first place. I purchased my first personal computer in 1978 and have never been without one since. When I moved to Apple, it was like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders: I don't have to be a system engineer to make all the stuff work together. That was true until recently. Now, I see the same kind of problems that occurred in the Windows world popping up in Apple country: specifically, it's up to me to figure out workarounds to software bugs. I really don't want to have to do that.

I did some research on alternatives to iPhoto and Aperture and believe I have found the critical flaw: Apple stores all the information about my photos in a database that it manages--and that database is proprietary and cannot be repaired with the tools provided to repair it. I was also shocked to find in one article that the author could find no professional photographers that use either product!

Looking for value, I looked at Picasa. While I have a prejudice against Google for their recent actions relative to Apple (namely Android), they use a different logic: store all information in the photo itself, then extract from the photos to make up the display. This approach has one big upside: NO DATABASE! While Picasa does store faces in a .plist, you can also have them added to the photo. The cure for a contaminated faces database in Picasa is to delete the database and have Picasa recreate it by reading the photo data.

My research indicates there is no standard for storing name data in a photo. That means Picasa has it's way (which it understands), but there is no guarantee that anyone else can make sense of the data. Not too excited about that, but found an app on the app store called Photo Meta Edit. It shows all the data stored with the photo, and allows you to directly edit it. I kinda like that. Here's how a face is stored. It is in the XMP section in 3 sub-sections. Here are the entries:

mwg-rs:Area

stArea:h 0.0556586

stArea:unit Normalized

stArea:w 0.0300926

stArea:x 0.721065

stArea:y 0.580705

mwg-rs:Name Bernice McCoy

mwg-rs:Type Face

I think the program was $3-4.

So, I'm thinking about migrating from Aperture to Picasa. I'd do that by exporting each event into a new physical folder, exporting the current version (which is edited). Maybe keep Aperture as a storage spot for the originals. Picasa interface is kinda intuitive. I like it shows all the photos with location info, and the date when the photo is selected.

I'd like your experiences and recommendations.