iPhoto ’09 for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide

Chapter 4. Working with Faces

The most important addition to iPhoto ’09 is Faces, which can detect faces in photos and, after you’ve trained it by identifying a person in a number of photos, automatically recognize that person’s face in other photos.

Faces is important for two reasons. First, as our digital photo collections grow—I have about 17,000 photos right now, and many people have far more—it becomes ever more difficult to find any given photo. That’s not because iPhoto’s search tools are bad, but because adding keywords or other metadata takes time many of us don’t have. With a little effort spent training Faces, you can reap the benefits of having useful metadata automatically applied to many of your photos.

Second, from a historical standpoint, ...