Faces in Apple's Aperture 3.1

Wow, I have read a few negative comments on this feature and only turn it on to update when my machine is not in use, so I thought it was about time some positive was fed back.

Faces is a feature of Apples Aperture software that analyses every photograph for faces and then categorises them, allowing you to tag people and then have it find more faces that it believes matches your tags. It takes a fair while for the software to analyse the images and fair enough, I mean I have some group photographs with 50 plus people in them.

Well twice within the last week I have been saved hours by the faces feature. One company I shoot for, 44,000 images over the last 6 years, contacted me asking for all the images of two of their exec's that I have.

Now to manually go through each image looking for faces, including groups, general shots of audiences and so forth would take forever. Faces allowed me to find all the images, and I do mean all, from the portraits to the out of focus and side on in the background. Awesome, especially that I was able to do each within three hours, manually to do this in three hours, I would have had to view 244 images per minute!

From the obvious where the name is in the shot...

To the not so obvious...

The nice thing is that next time I need an image of either of these people, the metadata is now embedded and the search only two or three seconds!

I am impressed, okay it may take a machine with some serious grunt to achieve this, my guess though is that in another two generations of computers this task will be even quicker and achievable on the most basic of new computers.