At this point, I’ve lost track of how many hours I’ve spent trying to get the face recognition built into Aperture 3 to work.  I realized something today, that the software has not asked in days if it had correctly identified a person.  Sure, it went and found a bunch of faces and although I’ve now tagged thousands and thousands of pictures, it doesn’t seem to have any functionality to actually learn what those people look like.

Let me say without reservations that I fully regret investing time and money in this software.

I have now also discovered the cause for my odd text entry quirk reported in the previous post.  Turns out that what was happening was even more stupid then I believed.  In tagging photos of “michael” I believe at some point I mistakenly tagged one of the shots as “Michelle”.  After it appeared in the main window, a face with the wrong name, I clicked on the name and corrected it to Michael.  All should be well, right?  Wrong…

In some instances still not fully understood by me, this can cause ALL of the photos of one person to be merged into the other name.  In my case, the reason why I could not seem to type Michael without having Michelle show up was that aperture had merged ALL of the photos of Michael into Michelle.  To further cloud this bug, after the merge of those two names, I could not even type the word “Mike” or “Miguel” without Michelle showing up.  I have Mike identified as well as Miguel in numerous photos, but this unexpected merging somehow caused those two names to disappear as options while still retaining them in the main “Faces” page.

I also discovered that “Greg” was eaten by “Gretchen”, “Jaina” was consumed by “James” and “Sara T.” completely absorbed “Sarah P.”  That’s as far as I’ve gotten…I don’t know how far the damage extends at this point, but with over 17k images…the usefulness of this feature kind of hinges on it behaving as expected.  There should be no way through accident, carelessness or software bug that two separately identified names can be irrevocably merged without so much as a dialogue box confirmation.

After reading this post regarding aperture’s database, I’m even less confident in the program as a whole.  I wonder if I’m just wasting my time organizing my library when I should probably be looking at migrating to a more stable platform.  How’s the Lightroom 3 Beta running for people out there?  Can it be worse then Ap3?

This guy writes about how extensive use of the “Brushes” feature causes memory leaks and brings his system to it’s knees.  While I don’t look forward to discovering new bugs and performance issues in Aperture, I can’t even get around to adjusting pictures when I’m forced to spend so much time struggling with the core faces feature.

This blog post details a few potential fixes, but unfortunately the majority of the advice out there focuses on turning off the Faces feature entirely.  Since that is one of the main reasons I wanted to upgrade to Ap3, I’ll just have to play the waiting game and see if Apple can actually get this working.