The Things iPhoto Thinks Are Faces group already has 86 screen captures in its pool, which I'm sure is going to grow. And by the looks of it, iPhoto is as keen on seeing faces in mountains, piles of rocks and at the bottom of an empty glass as the most superstitious astrological devotee. Or Virgin-Mary-in-Toast spotter.

[Things iPhoto Thinks Are Faces - Flickr, gallery credits: ruudvaneijk, maczydeco, edu Mac nation, Daragh, iafroman, bgmb42, bgmb42-1, bgmb42-2, bgmb42-3 - Thanks, Jimbo!]

I mean, c'mon, it looks like just a teddy bear! And maybe a teddy bear face doesn't constitute a human face to some of you in the audience, but I like to think that our world has grown beyond such prejudices. I like to believe that we live in a world in which any face can be considered a face.

The only way this iPhone spot could have been better is if it found the Virgin Mary in a burnt piece of bread. It'll happen. Just give it time. [Flickr via Geekologie]

The big story for iPhoto '09—part of Apple's newly released iLife '09 suite—is that organization gets two new dimensions. In iPhoto '08, time, the most important organizing tool for photos, was more or less mastered with the advent of Events. Now there are Faces and Places, organizing by people and location.

I'm not going to BS you: There's a slim-to-nil chance you will use either to tag every last one of your photos. Still, both are good new ways to organize things so that you can find your best photos faster, and that's coming from a guy who, in just 36 hours, has organized two or three metric shiteloads of photographic goodness.

FACES
This isn't tagging pictures with people in it—it's actually identifying and recognizing people, so you don't have to go looking for them. You have to approve every suggestion it makes, but if you know the tricks, that's easy. Does Faces work? Yes. Well? Yes. But at first, you have to work with it. Yesterday, I outlined how the facial detection and recognition works (and doesn't work). Now here's where you come in:

After the system filters all your photos, looking for faces and doing basic recognition of appearance—a process that takes approximately 1 second per photo on newer Macs—you go to any photo, click Name and identify a person, preferably someone you love and have lots of photos of. We'll totally hypothetically call that person Jeremy.

Tip: In the early round, only name people whose faces iPhoto detected. Don't draw a "missing face" box (shown below) around anybody at this point, because the computer can't use it to find more pictures of your loved one.

Once you've made the initial ID, Jeremy's mug will appear on the Faces corkboard. Clicking on Jeremy brings up any photo (or photos) that you identified in the first step. Underneath a thick border, the computer will show you new photos it thinks are Jeremy. It will be mostly wrong. Do not panic.

Select "Confirm Name" and start clicking on the first photos you see of Jeremy. Do 10 if you can, but fewer is okay. Click Done and wait. Each time you greenlight actual Jeremy photos, the computer churns, using what it now knows to find new shots of Jeremy. It shows the most likely shots are at the top, so towards the bottom of the suggested matches, you get some serious riff-raff.

Tip: The tools are important to learn. Click and drag across photos to confirm multiple shots of Jeremy. Option-click and drag across photos to reject multiple shots who are not Jeremy. Rejection is important, so that the computer knows what not to look for. When you are not in "Confirm Name" mode, just drag shots of Jeremy up into the confirmed-shot window, and delete ones that are not Jeremy.

At some point in this process, the computer just runs out of suggestions. If you think there are more pics of Jeremy, go looking for them. Some good shots may have failed face detection. When you find them, you'll need to draw a "missing face" window around Jeremy's face, type in his name, and that shot will then show up in Jeremy's Faces dossier.

When you think you've got Jeremy's Greatest Hits pretty much nailed, start in on Jeremy's much more attractive sisters. Repeat the process for Jeremy's sisters, mother, brother, great-uncle and everyone else you have more than 25 photos of whose name you can still remember. Then whenever you want to find that one damn photo of them doing that one crazy thing, you know where to look.

Tip: In Faces, select two or more people and click Smart Album. On the left, you'll see an album containing those people, which you can rename "My Family" or "College Friends" or "Girls That Got Away" or whatever. Click on the smart album and you'll get a sea of photos with at least one person in each shot.

PLACES
In some ways, Places is less automatic than Faces, but in many ways it's much easier to work with. Since it doesn't rely on face detection, recognition and a heaping helping of trial and error, it's much quicker than the at times sluggish Faces. Also, you don't have to go in deep to add location data. Since iPhoto '09 gives every event and every photo an Info button, you can just click to add locations to any cluster of images.

As you might expect, there are multiple ways to input location data. If you have an iPhone or are lucky enough to have a geotagging module for your camera, you don't have to do squat. Just load your pics, click Places, and smile at your vast array of gleaming red pins. But if you're like most of the universe, you need to input the location information yourself, which you do by selecting an event or photo, and clicking the Info button.

Tip: Command-click multiple events to select them, then double-click any one of the selected events. You will instantly get a photo cluster containing only those combined photos. Select all, click "Info" on any of the individual shots, and any change you make to it—such as entry of geographical data—is made for all.

Once you're in the Info pane, start typing a location in the appropriate text box. The computer guesses basic locations—most towns, cities and major landmarks in the US, plus larger cities around the world. It's easy to stump this one, though. Instead of settling on anything, click the "New Place..."

Here you have Google Local search, so whether it's the name of that resort in the Caribbean or the bar on Third Avenue, you'll find it pretty easily. I will warn you: Sometimes the Google search localizes on the wrong area, returning only businesses and addresses in a particular city, so be sure to type your city and state. If you want an address, just type it into the search windows.

Once you've searched for something, click the plus-sign and you can add it to My Places, a list of the locations you are assigning to your photos. You can rename however you like, and once you've added them, they show up in the high-level location search, so they're easy to re-use whenever you want.

After you've added a few locations, click the Places tab on the top left corner of iPhoto. You'll see a big Google map, with pins for all the photos you've tagged. Click a pin and you get an arrow; click the arrow and you get your photos. When looking at one of your geotagged photos, go up to the Photo menu and select "Show Extended Photo Info." Suddenly you'll see not just the shot's metadata, but the geographical latitude and longitude that came either from GPS or your own data entry. The shame is that they're indistinguishable, since unless you're inputting street addresses for geotags, the GPS data is going to be much more accurate.

Tip: Clicking on a pin gives you only shots from that specific geographical location. For instance, the Seattle pin may not give you shots you took at a bar downtown, if you gave that bar a more particular geography. In this case, search for "Seattle" and you will see all shots geotagged in the metro area, plus any shot tagged Seattle or living in a folder called "Seattle."

Once you've geotagged your photos, you can make use of the mapping feature when making a "travel book." Unlike iMovie, there's only one map style, but as you can see, there are still many different ways to position a map in the book:

RETOUCHING & ENHANCING
There was a time when I'd rather use anything but iPhoto to tweak my shots, but little by little, useful adjustment tools are making their way in. This time around, saturation has been made "smart"—you can click it to adjust background color vibrancy without messing up skin tones. There's a "definition" slider, which brings out details—a good alternative to the sharpness slider.

The retouch brush has been given the ability to find edges. In the shot below, you can see how it removed the water stain easily, but preserved the all-important cable-knit pattern of my dad's sweater-vest.

Most of the updated tools are great, but although red-eye reduction is finally automatic, it's still better done by hand, or by an app other than iPhoto.

For starters, it only can automatically remove red-eye from faces it detects, and though the Faces feature is great, there are still problems with detection.

When it does detect them, it drops round black splotches onto each eye, like you see here, even if the eyes are half closed. Not only that, but there's no way to adjust the opacity or hue of the dots, so everyone gets a seriously black eye, even when gray or maybe a nice brown would better suit them. I find that going in by hand and using a smaller dot works well enough for most cases, though if you're planning to share or frame a shot, Photoshop or really any enthusiast-level photo editor would be a better option.

SLIDESHOWS & SHARING
The final major improvement of iPhoto '09 is the way you take photos out of iPhoto and into other realms. There are now six themes for animated slideshows, some zanier than others, like the acid-flashback "Shatter" or the mod cinematic "Sliding Panels." You can add any music from iTunes that you want (DRM or not) though Apple pairs the themes themselves with great, recognizable music already, as you can hear in the following "Scrapbook" slideshow of my two cats, Wade and Wynona, which was made in a few clicks with default settings:

Tip: Select Fit Slideshow to Music Duration to avoid weird looping or awkward cutoffs. You might need to add photos or remove them, though, to modify the pacing.

The only weird thing is that once you've set up a slideshow, you have to exit out of it to export it. Just make sure your settings are fine, escape out of the full-screen slideshow interface, then, while you're still in the album that is tied to that slideshow, choose Export... from the File menu. Clicking the Slideshow tab will give you the handsome menu chart you can see below, a wonderful help for saving at the right quality and resolution. (Honestly, I'd like to see more of this in QuickTime Pro and iMovie.)

The final component to iPhoto '09 is how it shares to Facebook and Flickr. As a father of an almost-1-year-old (who my wife won't allow to appear on Giz), I have 7,000,000,000 photos on my MobileMe gallery, but nearly nothing on my Facebook page, because I forget to upload to it. Now, once I activate a gallery, I can just drag photos to it whenever I feel like it, just like I do with MobileMe. Let's be honest here: Who needs MobileMe when you can use the same tool to upload to Facebook and Flickr? Wait, I know the answer to that: Grandparents need MobileMe. If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry. To quote Zep, your time is gonna come.

That's it for me. I've aired my complaints here and there, but for the most part, I've banged my head against every part of this program, and I can safely say 90% of the additions are improvements. I am not annoyed at learning the new functionality, and I don't think there's a lot of dead weight either. I'd be happy to answer any questions, but hopefully most answers are already in the text above, as thorough as I aimed for it to be. Bottom line: All this, plus the improved iMovie '09 and the not-as-obviously-useful GarageBand and iWeb upgrades are all available in the same box, now, for $79. It would be nice if you could just download an iPhoto-only license for $29 or something, but the whole iLife '09 kit ain't bad. [iPhoto '09]

Face Detection
Apple says it uses facial detection to determine the existence of faces, and then facial recognition to separate one person from the other. The problem is, that first step is far from a catch-all:

• It suffers from the typical face-detection problem of an incomplete picture—it won't pick up all faces turned to the side, revealing just one eye. But far worse than that, it has a very hard time picking up faces tilted to either side, even if they're otherwise perfectly clear and symmetrical. In other words, if the year is 2029 and Apple's deathbots are coming for you, cock your head to the side, and they'll just truck on by.

• The other problem iPhoto's face detection suffers from is overconfidence. Sure, it makes sense that it picks up the faces of Mount Rushmore (well, at least Lincoln's) but it'll invent eyes and a nose from any old rumpled curtain or wood grain when it wants to.

Face Recognition
Once you get past the detection, the recognition kicks on. Some people are already saying it's crap, but it's remarkable when it wants to be. How do I know it's working? Because on many occasions I have seen it correctly identify faces in frames in the background of a shot. But recognition has some hang-ups of its own:

• Once you name a person and click on their face on the corkboard, iPhoto suggests lookalikes, which you approve or reject by clicking. The first round of suggestions are mainly nonsense—iPhoto needs a lot of data to work correctly. Confirm the identity of your subject 10 or 20 times then click Done so the system can recalibrate.

• In the first round or two, recognition errs on the side of inclusion: A bald guy with a beard and glasses won't just bring up similarly described gents, but will attract everybody who is bald, everybody who wears glasses and everybody with a beard. In my experiences, the images with the closest resemblance appear first, but as you scroll down, there are more and more random guesses. When it comes to babies, good luck—in those early rounds, iPhoto thinks all babies look alike. Again, you approve the suggested photos that are of the same person, and reject the ones that are not.

• Once you've done a round or two greenlighting more accurate shots of the person, it's important to reject ones that are not. If you leave them there, iPhoto will keep on suggesting them. I found that, if two people look kinda alike, it pays to identify them both, and go back and forth between them confirming more and more shots, so iPhoto learns faster who belongs where.

• Baldness, hair color and facial hair are all strong indicators for iPhoto. If your friend has a goatee or some kind of fancy moustache, don't ever let him shave it off. Likewise, if your mom switches hairstylists and starts getting a different dye job, she may as well don full hunter's camouflage. For some reason, iPhoto had an easier time discerning the blondes than the brunettes.

• People wearing glasses cause iPhoto to suggest matches of other people wearing glasses, in some cases people who are otherwise comically different. But iPhoto seems to have a lot of trouble with glasses in general, and can't always grasp the glasses-wearer well enough to confidently suggest more of that same person. Sunglasses are obviously a problem for recognition, but people wearing sunglasses are often suggested for anyone wearing glasses, as if it was all the same to iPhoto.

• There are two kinds of recognition dead-ends you can encounter, where iPhoto won't suggest any more photos for a person, even though you know they're out there, and where iPhoto suggests an endless supply of random faces as potential matches, clearly unable to narrow it down further. Both are infuriating, and require you to go out and identify photos manually in hopes of jogging its memory.

• Pets are not guaranteed to work with recognition. I'm not going to slander the good people of MacLife by calling BS, but seriously, I can't get neither cat nor dog to be recognized in any way by iPhoto, and I don't believe it's possible. You can identify them yourself, of course, but the reason it doesn't pull up suggested shots containing the same furry animal is that it's not looking at furry animals.

The Faces system is technically a time saver even when the recognition is not up to snuff, because by batching the more-or-less appropriate pictures together, you can tag them a lot faster than you otherwise could. There are plenty of user interface problems that I will address in the actual review, but in the meantime, I will leave you with this: After heavy testing for half a day, iPhoto became shockingly good at identifying my face. I can only imagine that, given more calibration and identified content, it will be better and better. My biggest fear is how many photos aren't clearing the first hurdle—face detection—and are therefore left completely out of the system. Who would have thought that the recognition would be easier to nail than the detection? Not me. [iPhoto '09]