I can’t count how many times I have looked on the back of a photograph hoping the photographer wrote down who those people are, or when or where the photo was taken. Well, it would actually be a fairly small number, but boy is it annoying when you want the data and it just isn’t there. Digital cameras will almost always automatically embed date information for you (and if not, then the software you pick them up with will!) Newer GPS (sat nav) enabled cameras will capture the “where” as well. But it’s still not automatic to capture the “who.”
iPhoto has this pretty cool feature where it’ll auto-identify people’s faces in the photos and give you a chance to name them. Like with most meta-data, I find myself quite variable in actually choosing to spend the time updating it. But this week, I’m on holiday in Scotland, so I can be a bit better about those sorts of little things in life. So, I was using the iPhoto names feature. For the most part, I was pretty impressed. It’s certainly cleverer software than I could write. But it also made some pretty funny mistakes. I thought I’d share a couple of those mistakes with you.