Quick tip: Using Faces in iPhoto

Organizing the hundreds, if not thousands, of digital photographs you have on your Mac can be a tedious process. Apple added facial recognition to iPhoto to help ease the pain. Check out these tips to get more out of Faces in iPhoto '11.

If you have recently attempted to add faces to Faces in iPhoto '11, you may notice that there could be an amazing amount of pages of faces to accept. Clicking to accept each face to confirm can take a long time. First, you have to identify a few faces for iPhoto to find.

Click on Faces in iPhoto '11 and enter the names of the people in the photos. This gives the facial recognition software a name to match with other look-alikes. Once you've entered some of the main names, you can mass accept (or reject) suggestions for each name.

Go to your Faces corkboard window and double-click a person. You will see all the photos that have already been tagged. At the bottom of the window, iPhoto will tell you how many additional photos may contain that person. Click "Confirm Additional Faces..." to show photos that iPhoto thinks contain that person.

To mass accept the photos as your person, click and drag a box around each picture that is correct. You can also drag around the entire selection (which will accept all the photos), and then simply click on the photos you wish to reject.

You can also hold Option and drag a box around any photos you wish to reject. Once you have the photos properly accepted or rejected, click Done. Notice that iPhoto will often find more photos based on your selections, so you may have to repeat the process a couple times.

Once you get Faces started, it becomes more and more accurate, making future imports a snap to keep organized. Got a great organizational tip for iPhoto '11? Let me know in the comments!

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