iPhoto: The Missing Manual

Chapter 4. Faces and Places

iPhoto gives you plenty of ways to organize pictures into neat little collections, but so far most of the methods you’ve learned involve doing it manually. Manually apply keywords. Manually drag things into albums. Drag, drag, drag.

Happily, 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 feature uses facial 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 Tyler for that last-minute, surprise birthday party slideshow or your parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. This isn’t the crude sort of facial recognition that you find in lesser programs or even in digital cameras, which can really only tell you if there’s a face in the picture. iPhoto goes a step further and tells you whose face it is.

If your camera captures location info (and your iPhone does), you can also round up photos based on where they were taken. Imagine the joy of instantly locating pictures from a recent vacation—without keywording them—in order to show them off during a dinner party. And how easy would it be to create a calendar or book from your family’s Yellowstone vacation if those pictures just naturally migrated together?

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