Faces

A couple of days ago I bought myself a MacBook Pro.  My head approved because I am developing myself professionally - we are increasing our use of Macs at school and I need to understand them better.  My heart approved because Macs are fab.

Making friends with my new toy, I have transferred all my photographs into iPhoto.  It has some cool tools in there, like the ability to sort photos geographically and present them on a google map.  Another cool tool is face recognition.

iPhoto can identify faces in your photos and if you tell it who they are, it starts to recognise them itself.  To speed the process up, it provides suggestions and you just confirm or not.  If I’m not being clear... watch this: http://www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials/#iphoto-people

Here’s what it looks like as you confirm that it is getting the faces right;

And here’s what it looks like when it gets it a bit wrong;

Its pretty impressive really. This picture came up a few times;

It struck me as strange because of the poor quality of the picture and the odd angle.  My photography skills are surely not that poor!  And then I realised just how clever this feature is.  It was recognising Dad’s face from a photo frame I have sitting on my desk;

Impressive, isnt it?  But we all make mistakes.  So when it started getting it wrong at first there was a lot of confusing Jennifer and Catherine.  That makes sense - the familial similarities must make it difficult.

As iPhoto works away, it gets more and more accurate with its guesses, but it can still get it spectacularly wrong.  Here are some of the highlights;

Dad doesn’t look this scary!

Neither do I;

This is not my housemate;

My brother, the look-alike;

He can do several impersonations, apparently;

Wow!  Is there an end to his impersonating skill?

No, clearly not;

Even Dad gets in on the impressions act;

And David can do statues too;

And now for the top three...  Sorry Catherine, at number 3, iPhoto mistook this plate of Beef Stew with Herby Dumplings for you;

And sorry to Jennifer too... at number 2 we have perhaps the worst mistake;

And at number one, a slightly less insulting error... at least this bear looks studious here Dad.  That’s probably why the mistake was made;

So far I have only done family and housemates... everyone else watch this space!