iPhoto 2009: Faces

I was playing around with iPhoto 2009 the other day and I find how Apple has made use of face detection to organize photos pretty fascinating.

What probably started in the late 1990s (I'm just guessing), has gone a long way. Face detection has been in virtually all modern cameras for awhile now. Since January 2009, its also in photo management applications.

What I find most fascinating about Faces (as they affectionately call it) in iPhoto is their execution of what is essentially a semi-supervised learning process. For those unfamiliar, Faces basically works like this:

1. iPhoto scans all your photos for possible faces. This is done once for every (new) photo.
2. As you view your photos, you may name these faces, whenever convenient. iPhoto remembers these names.
3. Even with only 1 labeled photo, you can open up the Faces category, and iPhoto will give you suggestions on what other faces may also be the named person.
4. You click once to confirm. Click again to reject.

I imagine that as more photos are labeled, the model of what the named person looks like (in whatever features that iPhoto actually uses) gets better and to the end-user, iPhoto gets "smarter".

So the point in this semi-supervised process is:

1. How can we make the process fun? Clicking on peoples faces is pretty fun.
   
2. How can we make it convenient? Only one click is needed to confirm.
3. How can we motivate the end-user? Integration with Facebook, a nice UI to display all faces and the corressponding photos.

Of course, Faces does not solve all our problems with photos. In fact, we don't really know what our problems are. As end-users, we use what is provided and are more or less content about it. Only when a better way is shown, do we say: "Hey... That looks useful."

What other affordances do we need to manage our photos? How else can we make use of our photos? What about other forms of media?

Photo obtained from iPhoto website. Copyright Apple Inc.