bagging a bug bag for face faceoff

I keep a reusable bag in the car boot for when I'm buying a few groceries or similar. I should estimate I've bought around ten of the bags at different times, but they seem to disappear of their own accord, long before they've worn out. So today I bought yet another one to restock the car. It also gave me an excuse to experiment with Apple's new iPhoto face recognition software.

I noticed that iPhoto lets you access an Aperture library, which is where I keep my photos stored. I grabbed 2-3 folders of maybe 100 pictures with a few consistent faces, taught the names to iPhoto and it then ran through the pictures getting the names mainly right. It missed a few but didn't guess any incorrectly.

Hmm, I thought, maybe it uses shapes and dates. So I then tried it with the ladybird on the shopping bag. I taught it the name and showed it 4 almost identical photos of the ladybird. It didn't have a clue. So it seem that the Face recognition isn't going to be fooled too easily with alien shapes.

My next experiment will be with the new ironic film soundtrack loops available in Garageband.

paparazzi enabled

T'internet ground to a halt for a while today whilst various services streamed updates from San Francisco about the new guitar and piano tuition available from GarageBand '09 and similar features.

One function that caught my eye is the new iPhoto software with face recognition technology.

Not just the little squares like those that appear in many compact cameras, but the addition of identification of the individual. Useful for family photo albums, and interesting when linked with the new place recognition and auto-uploads to facebook and flickr.

The uploaded pictures can be auto-tagged with who and where. It could bring a whole new dimension to the Facebookery of late night pub crawls and similar.