It used to be you'd buy a roll of film in advance of a special occasion, then you'd take 36 photos of the most important and memorable moments (actually 32 of memorable moments, two of whatever was in front of the camera while you were winding the roll on, and another two of your butt to finish the roll and give the lab guy a thrill - never stops being funny).
Then you'd send the film off to be processed and, when it came back you'd sift through the prints and choose a handful of the very best ones. These would then sit in a drawer for years waiting for you to do something useful with them.
Now, in the age of digital, we all carry cameras everywhere, photographing any stupid thing that takes our fancy. Then we take the camera home and upload the photos to our hard drives, where they sit for years waiting for us to do something useful with them.
Ah, progress.
Of course technology has a way of taking the fun out of such traditions, and there are now applications to help you track all those photos and find the ones you want instantly.
Two of the crazes in that field are "geotagging" and facial recognition.
I'm going to leave geotagging aside for the moment, because at best it's a gimmick and at worst it's a waste of time for everything other than travel shots or maybe crime scene documentation.
On the other hand, while relatively few people have GPS-equipped cameras, almost everyone I know has a face of some description. (On a curious note, almost everyone I know has more than the average number of feet - there's a statistical oddity for you.)
Apple recently started shipping a new version of its iPhoto software, which includes facial recognition. Despite what you may have read it is not the first commercial software to do this.
It is, however, kinda fun. And it's what I've been playing with for a week or so, so here we are.
The way it works is this: you find a picture of someone you know. You click on "Name" and then tell iPhoto the name of the person. You do this a couple of times so it gets a reasonable idea.
Then you click on "Confirm Name" and it offers up suggestions of other photos that may be of the same person. Hilarity ensues.
Generally, this is of the "how funny, it thinks this picture of Aunt Hazel is a picture of Uncle Bob - then again, she does have a facial hair issue" type.
A friend of mine had it suggest a picture of a lemur as a potential match for him. His nose isn't that big.
My favourite mismatch so far came while identifying pics of a friend, when iPhoto suggested a dozen possible matches, none of which was him. One of them, indeed, was a picture of my wife, during childbirth.
Without going into too much detail that you do not want, it was not a picture of her face.
I don't think I'll tell my friend about that.
Interestingly, when Apple's head shill, Phil Schiller, showed off iPhoto's facial recognition at the Macworld Expo a month or so back, it seemed to work flawlessly.
Identify a face, and from then on it's just a matter of saying yea or nay to suggestions. No indication it would completely fail to notice a face on screen if it was more than about 30 degrees off vertical.
No indication that random body parts could be mistaken for faces (seriously, my friend doesn't even have a beard).
The other thing Schiller didn't demonstrate, but that I was interested to know, was how well it copes with photos of babies.
They change fairly radically in pretty short spans of time, you see, so how well is this thing going to know my three-day old daughter having had her identified in pics when she's three years old?
Answer: passably. It took a long time and a lot of identifying which babies were not her, but it's certainly getting the hang.
I've learned a couple of things from this exercise. One, it takes a long time. Spending a couple of hours a day for a week doing nothing but identifying people in photos, I'm about a third of the way through my 25,000-photo library (most of which are of my daughters).
Two, my daughters looked really similar as babies. In the ID phase iPhoto just shows you the face, not anything else in the pic, and on that basis I was having trouble for a while picking which was which. Like iPhoto, though, I'm getting the hang.
And finally, if you have thousands of photos of babies on your computer, looking at just the faces with nothing else in the image for context is a bit freaky. They're so cute on their own, but in a swarm like that they look weird.
You've been warned.
Matthew JC. Powell welcomes his new infant overlords. Dribble on mjcp@mac.com
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