iPhoto '11: The Missing Manual

Chapter 4. Faces and Places

iPhoto gives you plenty of ways to organize your pictures into neat little collections. But until the ’09 version came along, the only way to organize everything was manually. Manually apply keywords. Manually drag things into albums. Drag, drag, drag.

Now it’s all different. iPhoto comes with two features that organize your photos automatically. You’d call it artificial intelligence if it didn’t seem so much like real intelligence.

One of them uses face recognition to group your photos based on who’s in them. It can be extremely handy when, say, you need to quickly round up a bunch of pictures of Chris for that last-minute, surprise-party slideshow. This isn’t the crude sort of face recognition that you find in lesser photo programs or even in digital cameras, which can tell you only if there’s a face in the picture. iPhoto attempts to go a step further and tell you whose face it is.

You can also round up photos based on where they were taken. You can compare various trips to Paris, for example, or show friends what else you did in Chicago besides go to a White Sox game.

Meet Faces and Places, two iPhoto features that have become favorites of people who really want to get to the who and the where of their photos.

Faces

Here’s the Faces feature in a nutshell: By analyzing the unique properties of each face in each photo—distance between the eyes, nose, mouth, hair color, lack of hair, and so on—iPhoto attempts to distinguish among the people in the photos of ...