I am mainly using Aperture but I do have and use iPhoto for various purposes and I want to put in a plug now for a great program that makes using iPhoto even easier than it is:  iPhoto Buddy.

This is a wonderful new feature of iPhoto.  I am going through some older photographs in an older iPhoto library, family photos over two or three generations.  You pick a photograph of a person and click on the 'Name' icon in the lower left corner of the window of images.  You identify that person and then go to the Faces area, select the person, a new screen opens with the photos you have identified as containing that person and below is a group of photos with [perhaps] that person.  Click on 'confirm name' and you can quickly click on each image that is, in fact that person and skip others other that are not. 

Then, as the program learns the features, you can again hit the 'confirm name' button and new possible matches are suggested, perhaps not as easily matched but some are accurately selected.

I found an article at the Aperture Users Network which discusses and explains the Faces 'tool' in iPhoto09 and thought I'd share it here.  As its author, David Schloss, says, the concept builds on the way the human brain allows us [or, at least some of us, since I'm not often right] to identify people over time.  I thought this was particularly fascinating:

The human brain is specifically designed to find faces, it's an evolutionary trait that's required to help us differentiate between our parents and a hungry lion. It also happens to be a bit of a tricky task for a computer to manage thanks to the changing nature of the human face.

Generally speaking facial recognition works by figuring out the geometric patterns between key elements in the face and assigning values to those patterns. Anything that has the same pattern is probably the same person.

But think about the huge variability of people over time. Children age, changing their faces both lengthwise and in width. As we age our features sag or get thinner or thicker–the geometric patterns between our nose and our chins might not change, but anyone who has seen a show like "The Biggest Looser" knows how radically a face can change over time. And most photo albums have photographs of people over a vast speriod (my wife, for example, is in photographs going back until January 2000, when I put my first image in iPhoto.

But not only are faces able to morph over time, they're often distorted by the lens, covered by objects like glasses headwear, scarves and many other objects that our brain just works around. Multiply that by the various directions the face is viewable from (a profile looks different than a straight-on head shot) and you see the enormous challenges inherent in finding a face in a crowd.

Fascinating.  Be sure to work with it a bit, zoom in and look at the various people and what they are doing during the speech.  David Bergman's Blog

Not for heavy lifting, but great for what is sometimes needed.  I wanted to take a rectangular image and make it into a square without going thru a whole program for the task.  Snipshot does a great job of doing just that.  

Steve Weller runs the excellent blog called Bagelturf. He recently posted some great tips for speeding up your use of Aperture and, generally, your Mac. Recommended reading.

His ebook, by the way, Get Your Hands Around Aperture, is also excellent [link is on his site].

Here's an image for you, just a little fun picture of a Swiss Guard at the Vatican from last fall. I like the way he looks pensive and worried, biting his lip.