Ideas to improve Aperture’s Faces feature

I must say that I really like Aperture’s Face Detection feature. Its not perfect and takes a loooong time to run initially on your photo library, but its impressive nonetheless. Rarely I learned that much about the pictures I have taken over the last years.

However, no new technology comes without flaws and while I really like the interface of Aperture, I have a few ideas how to make it more useful in future versions.

More heuristics

Aperture is targeted for the professional photographer and what professional photographers often do is to shoot many pictures of the same people in a short amount of time. The face detection feature could use heuristics like “If there is a confirmed face of Mary shot at 1:00:01 and there is a confirmed face of Mary at 1:00:05 and there are detected faces in the pictures in between the time frame, the likelihood that the face belongs also to Mary is very, very high“.
For all my studio shootings, this would be a real time saver.

There could be probably more heuristics for faster organization and better detection of faces like taking color and background color into consideration. Pictures taken at events or in clubs often have a particular color to them (think gel’ed lights) which could cluster them somehow together.

Timesaving shortcut buttons

Currently there is only one way to select a huge amount of suggested faces in the “Mary may be also in the photos below” feature at once: You can drag a rectangle around all these pictures and they all turn into a green “Mary” marker. However, sometimes Faces finds more non-matching faces, so it would be more easy to toggle the selection into a red “Not Mary” and then just toggle the few Mary’s with one click into a green “Mary“. My point here is to toggle between a negative selection “None of these faces are Mary” or a positive selection “All of these faces are Mary“.

It could be implemented in 2 ways, the first idea would be 2 additional buttons like “Reject all” and “Select all” or a single toggle button like “Revert selection” which would turn on click all red “Not Mary” into a green “Mary“. This definitely would save time because after a selection, you only have to click the few Mary’s to turn them into a positive identification when there are less Mary’s in the picture than non-Marys, or vice-versa.

Bigger target buttons

One of the most subtle, but biggest improvement between Aperture 2 and Aperture 3 was the size of the controls…they grew just a little bit, but now they are much more easy to find and handle, especially on huge screens. Unfortunately the “Done” and “Cancel” buttons of the face detection are too tiny to make it easy to hit them. Make them just a bit bigger in the next update, please.

Priority Processing

For huge photo libraries like mine, it takes ages to process all the images. However, its implemented as a background process taking very little resources (if you have a powerful computer like I have). The good thing is that my computer is completely responsive and nothing slows down while the face detection does its thing. However at night when I am sleeping, the computer could speed the processing up and process more pictures in a shorter time. Again, this could be done with heuristics: “If its night and there was no mouse-move and no keyboard input in a certain time frame and the screensaver or screen energy saving is running, then ramp up the processor cycles for the background processing of the face detection.“.
As soon as the operator wiggles the mouse or presses a key to get the computer out of screen saver mode, the background processing could slow down a bit to not interrupt the foreground processing. Again, this would be a real time saver.

These are the features I would like to see in the next update of Aperture, but if somebody would pay me for thinking more, I am sure I could come up with many more ideas to make the Faces feature more pleasurable to use.