[Lee Yuan Sheng]

Heh, I think we've all been spoilt by Facebook. :P

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

Heh, I think we've all been spoilt by Facebook. :P

[doogald]

Originally Posted by jaxim

It stores it as a regular keyword tag. Nothing special. There's no data written to the file regarding WHERE the face is located in the photo.

That's probably the key problem - how to identify were the face is, particularly if you manually add an undetected face, or need to mark something that is incorrectly identified as a face as something that is not a face (i.e., a texture, a statue), or someone you are not interested in tagging - that prevents a two-way sync of this data.

I've read that Apple's iPhoto has an internal database in your photo library that stores face data; they are not part of the EXIF data for each photo. And you cannot move the database files from one iPhoto library to another. (You can, however, back up the faces database and move it back into a library if the library becomes corrupted.)

It would be nice if there was some sort of standard that was defined that attached the face data to metadata of each photo, for the sake of portability, etc.

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by jaxim

It stores it as a regular keyword tag. Nothing special. There's no data written to the file regarding WHERE the face is located in the photo.

Hmm. That's what I thought. I guess ultimately that's not such a bad thing, because it's not like you care where the face is, only that the photo contains that person you're looking for.

[Jonathon Watkins]

Originally Posted by Jason Dunn

Hmm. That's what I thought. I guess ultimately that's not such a bad thing, because it's not like you care where the face is, only that the photo contains that person you're looking for.

Yup - same thought here. It sound like it's good enough for what I'm looking for. A photographer cares about *who* is in the picture. If you can't work out where the face is, you have bigger problems. ;-)

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by Jonathon Watkins

Yup - same thought here. It sound like it's good enough for what I'm looking for. A photographer cares about *who* is in the picture. If you can't work out where the face is, you have bigger problems

I thought this way too, until I read a comment from someone else that said part of face tagging is allowing one generation to identify the next...as in, if we took the photo we'll know who's in it, but what about 100 years from now when we're dead? I have old photos I've scanned where I have no clue who the person is...so this is a real problem. I think specific, coordinate-based face tagging is important for the industry to come to an agreement on.

[doogald]

I'd think that you'd want face coordinates and names in the EXIF metatags to ensure that if you move to a new platform, you can take your face tagging with you. One of the great features of face tagging is the ability to recognize faces in future photos - you train the application to recognize people. If you import tagged photos into another app - say that somebody else comes out with a super-fantastic photo app in the future - you'll likely not want to go through that training process all over again.