The software I use for dealing with my photography over at Creative Splurges is a nifty piece of software called Aperture. I chose it over Photoshop because it has an iPhoto-like library element to it meaning I can easily keep my photos in one place where I can find them easily, whilst still offering fantastic RAW processing and image adjustments (and I chose it over Lightroom because 1. Aperture came first, and 2. Aperture integrates with my old iPhoto library). But this isn’t really of interest here, this is talk for ‘Splurges.
One of the amazing features of the latest version of Aperture is facial recognition technology. It will scan your photo library and pick out all of the faces, and tell them apart. All you have to do is put a name to the faces, and then you can easily see every photo with that person in it. It does have a learning curve, so it will ask you “is this Steve?” or “is this Susan?” as it learns to differentiate between people.
Sometimes, however, the technology does get a bit confused. When I first tried it out in iPhoto, it presented us with an image that contained a screwdriver and said, “Who’s this?”. It also does tend to pick out faces such as ones in painting and on statues.
It also, from time to time, can pick out faces in other places:
Of course, that one is almost to be expected.
When you are viewing images which contain a particular person, Aperture will also present you with faces that it thinks are that person. Sometimes it’s flattering, sometimes it compares girls to old men, and sometimes it’s downright confusing – take, for instance, this selection of faces that it thinks are me:
The- er, wait, what?
Although the title of this post (hopefully) conjures up memories of Douglas Adams’ excellent short dialogue about them, which (in my quick search of Google) doesn’t appear to actually be posted anywhere on the Internet, this post is more about my experience with the pesky little buggers.
My Blog Thing 