iPhoto 09: Faces Recognizes Our Cat!
January 27th, 2009
I plan to write a more in-depth review of iPhoto 09, but this is cool enough to mention right away.
I picked up iLife 09 today, and was most excited to use it for iPhoto’s “Faces” feature, which basically claims to make tagging photos a lot quicker using face recognition. You identify people’s faces with a name, and iPhoto goes through your photo library, finding and identifying people throughout all your photos.
That’s way cool, but ever since the keynote I was wondering if it would work on pets. We have a lot of photographs of our two cats, Java and Lilikoi.
So imagine my surprise when I identified Lilikoi’s face and… iPhoto did a remarkably good job of finding other photographs of her.

iPhoto was less successful identifying Java the cat, probably because he has black fur, and his face essentially looks like a black ball with two eyes. But I’m just overjoyed to get one cat out of the way.
So I’ll say it again – this is absolutely amazing. Please test iPhoto 09 on your pets and let me know the results; I’m really curious. Can it handle dogs? Fish? Hamsters? Inchworms? The mind reels at the possibilities.
[...] iPhoto 09: Faces Recognizes Our Cat » Webomatica [...]
I'm curious to see how well it does with my kids since their faces and appearance are still evolving and since I've got pics of them from baby to toddler to present.
Based on my limited experience, I think the change from toddler to young kid
would be a bit too drastic, but it does get better the more faces you
associate with a person. I would imagine a couple photos from different
stages would work pretty well to cover one person over time.
Right now I'm amused that it gets me mixed up with my brother – which is
understandable because we're related – but also in some photos when I smile
a certain way. It also gets my dad confused with one of his brothers
We just installed I-photo09 last night and it doesn't see our black cat at all!!!
I see it's only works for the white cats.
this program racist!
meow
[...] Obama uses a Mac iPhoto ‘09 recognizes pets [...]
Nice job, man !
Thank you Apple !!
[...] ‘09 that I spent hours just trying to match photos of friends and family. And according to Jason Kaneshiro, Faces also recognises his cats and were able to identify the two cats he has. Think the pattern [...]
LOL I does not work with my black cat also and he has some wight on him XD XD but my orange one it works but i have not [ictures of my dog as i took them with my web cam XD
Did you clone my sister's cat? That sure looks like her: http://www.chicagocanine.com/kikikitty.jpg
i want to try it with different womens breasts, like america, european, asian, eskimo
haha!
the breast idea is brilliant in its pervy glory
[...] Webomatica has found that it works on cats. I bet Apple was not counting on a revenue stream for iLife from [...]
Seems to me that the recognition process learns. Some folks you can select a single seed picture and it easily finds all the rest. Others required a couple of rounds of adding new pictures before it really honed in and got the whole bunch. So if your first attempt doesn't work, manually add a few additional pictures to that person's name and see if the results improve.
I spent about two hours with the thing yesterday and ended up identifying about 18 family member faces in nearly 3000 pics – including our Siamese cat, Zoe. As far as the kids go – we have pictures of our kids from birth up, and it did a very good job capturing all of them.
I tried it on my nephew and friends kid with pics of them over the years and it does really well.
Doesn't work on our dog. He's a miniature pinscher – think his face is just too dark.
yeah, these are really look alike!
[...] Identifying missing people: 2,700 people are reported missing every day, equaling almost a million people annually. Half of them are juveniles. FaceTrace could help identify whether a suspicious or lost person is indeed missing. With training, FaceTrace’s technology could also work for lost pets. [...]
[...] Identifying missing people: 2,700 people are reported missing every day, equaling almost a million people annually. Half of them are juveniles. FaceTrace could help identify whether a suspicious or lost person is indeed missing. With training, FaceTrace’s technology could also work for lost pets. [...]