After a few days of struggling with Aperture 3, I’ve come to discover some more of the quirks in the program. For me, one of the most vexing quriks is the general functionality of the “Faces” feature.
For those who haven’t tried out a demo or used iPhoto ’09 or Google’s Picasa, “Faces” is a facial recognition feature designed to find and identify all the people in your photographs. The idea is that Ap3 will search your shots and find faces first, then ask you to identify the faces it has found. After a face has been identified enough times, Ap3 will start to identify a given person in all your pictures and ask you for confirmation.
At least…that’s the way it’s supposed to work.
In practice, Ap3 has found podiums, statues, crests, watches, dark blobs, paintings and billboards almost as much as it has found faces. Ok, statues and paintings of people don’t bother me, but I don’t know how many times I’ve had to tell Ap3 that a wooden podium with sharp right angles is not a face.
I’d hoped that the 3.0.1 update would cure some of the ills I’d been experiencing with Faces, but all that seemed to do was stabilize the program a tiny bit, and everything is still as slow as tar on ice. Ap3 still can’t find my wife’s face after tagging almost 2,500 pictures of her. It still refuses to remember certain tags on certain shots, and in some random cases – it automagically ignores the keyboard entirely and refuses to recognize keystrokes.
I was working on a specific project containing pictures from a family vacation. In Ap3′s defense, my wife’s family has some strong genetics, so it has a devil of a time knowing which cousin is which, but in tagging the faces I discovered the most infuriating bug. I’d already identified sisters ”Megan” and “Michelle” a number of times in different projects, but in this one particular project I kept running into an issue with text entry. When I would type “Meg…” on a given photo, Aperture would autocomplete Megan’s full name.
Easy peazy, right?
Except when I would start to type “Mic…” it would change the “I” into an “E” and autocomplete Megan again. Backspacing the E and entering an I again resulted in an E. I thought I was going crazy, or that my touch-typing skills had gone dyslexic, so I did this a few more times while watching my fingers hit the keys.
No matter what I did, entering “M I” would result in “ME”. My temporary solution was to misspell the name and then drag the misspelled photos onto Michelle’s existing icon in the main browser. This is one of the rare times that I’ve actually filed a bug report on any of Apple’s feedback page, but I’m not entirely certain how this bug is happening so I have little confidence that they’d be able to duplicate the same issue.
That being said, I do now have some additional insight into the performance of Faces. As a whole, it is still a load of crap and doesn’t work well…but I have discovered a marked improvement in performance when identifying faces on a per-project basis as opposed to using the global faces window. The software still does not identify people it should already know, but when you tag a face, it does a much better job of finding all the other instances of that face within a project.
This seems to be completely hopeless in the global faces window, where it can’t seem to group instances at all.
Additionally, I have also discovered in working on a project by project basis, that there are TONS of faces that aperture is failing to discover in each picture. I’d assumed it was doing a pretty good job of finding everything because it located so many blurry people in the dark reaches of a frame, but on a project level it is missing tons of obvious and clear faces right in the forefront of many photos.
What does this mean? It means that you’re probably going to still need to go photo-by-photo if you care about thoroughly identifying all the faces in your shots. It is pretty simple to verify the tagged faces for accuracy, but without going shot-by-shot, you really have no idea of what aperture has missed. For me, trudging through over 17,000 images of mostly people isn’t going to be very much fun.
Hey…at least “Places” works for the most part…right?