iPhoto (iLife'09) + Facebook FAIL

Jan 31, 2009 at 6:45 PM
15 comments

iPhoto has a great new function called Faces. it scans every pic in your library, finds the faces and asks you to ID a few of them. Once you've ID'd a few of one person, iPhoto can do a reasonably good job of finding every other photo of that person in your library!

Face recognition in iPhoto

I turned it loose on my 9000+ library of photos and I was really impressed with this tool. It found me reliably quite often. It was only near the bottom of the stack that some of it's choices got a little weird:

iPhoto finding my face in the crowd

Weird that iphoto so often thinks I'm an asian lady.

And now comes the big time fail.

The problems start with the purported Facebook integration, in which you can upload your people-tagged photos to Facebook and the tags go with the photos up to Facebook.

Any FB user knows about face-tagging in the FB user interface. You upload a picture of you and your friends and then you click on one of their faces. A list of your Facebook friends pops up and you select which of them is in the photo. When you are done tagging all the faces in the photo, the photo has all the names of people at the base of the photo. The thing is, all the names are links which you can follow back to that person's facebook page. Cool! And when that person is tagged, they are sent a notification that a photo with them is now on Facebook.

Photo uploaded to Facebook and then tagged in Facebook

Part of the big deal of iPhoto 09 was the supposed Facebook / iPhoto integration. You can tag your photos in iPhoto using faces:

Photo in iPhoto, tagged in iPhoto

...and then upload them to Facebook using the Facebook uploader button and they show up in an album in your facebook account.

Cool, right?

NO, NOT COOL. Because iPhoto does not link the names in the photo with your friends' accounts. So, here's a photo with faces tagged in iPhoto uploaded to Facebook:

Photo tagged with faces in iPhoto then uploaded to Facebook

See how none of the names are links? They are plain text! They are not linked to my friends' FB accounts!

That means I am back to square one: Upload the damn photos to Facebook and tag them in Facebook the old, slow way. And any changes I make to the photos on Facebook are not carried back to the photos in my iPhoto album.

How lame is that?

I am irritated by this because it's a huge glaring oversight that severely hampers the facebook integration.

So, this is a neat feature but until this oversight is fixed, the integration is largely useless. This is a big oversight and I hope it gets fixed.

UPDATE:

http://www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials/#iphoto-facebook

Saw the video and the fix. Tried it out. In iPhoto, I added the first and last name to the name place and then the email address below that. I contacted the person in this photo to make sure it was the email address she uses for Facebook.

Adding full name and email in iPhoto

Then I click Done and watch the little facebook uplink make it's sync circle dance.

Facebook syncing

And then go to Facebook to check one of the photos:

Freaking names STILL NOT LINKED on Facebook

Same problem - NONE of the names are linked.

What gives, iPhoto'09? What am I doing wrong?

ARRRRGGGHHH!!!

15 comments

Comments

hey

apparently this is what you need to do, haven't tried it yet though. if you click the litle info button at the bottom right of the persons photo on the faces corkboard there is an option to add their full name and email address. Facebook will only connect your tag with your friends if the email address matched the address they use for facebook.

cheers

bagpie

[this is good]

Awesome - thanks for the tip on this!

I had just uploaded one album and was dismayed that the names weren't linked. After Googling and finding this webpage, I added the full name and email addresses on my Faces profile.

After doing that, I uploaded to Facebook and the names were actually linked! Nice!

Timmy! replied to newiphotouser’s comment:
Feb 2, 2009
Reply

Thanks for your reply. I am going to update the post.

...or a blonde lady with harsh red lipstick... zoiks!

[this is good]

Also another way to get this working (if you don't know the person's e-mail) is to manually tag one picture of them on facebook that you've uploaded from iPhoto, after that all the picture you upload of them will be properly tagged. This means however that you need to unpublish ,ie delete the 'facebook album' in iPhoto, any photo's you already have up and then republish them to fix the tags

I can confirm that it does work if you enter the person's email address under the "Faces" Info option.

Be sure you check their "Info" section on their facebook profile and get the right email address.

I've encountered the same problem as you and was as frustrated. I also did a bit of finding on this.

This is the SOLUTION.

After you have tagged the person using the Face Detection in iPhoto09, BEFORE you upload you have to ensure their email addresses (as per facebook) were duly filled in the "info" section. It is the email addresses that creates the link to Facebook's account. After doing so, then can you upload your photos to facebook.

cont'

How about albums that you had already uploaded to facebook? Will they be updated with the link (ie emails). The answer is NO. Therefore you will have to delete the album and RE-UPLOAD again for the link to work.

But after all this is done, the iPhoto09 to FB works like a charm!

[this is good]

Frankly, it's still a big pain even when you correct the address, a bunch of my FB contacts that I know in real life have used hotmail et al addresses for their facebook pages. But because I know them in real life in my actually address book, which iPhoto also uses, it has a different (read one that actually gets checked) e-mail address!

If I could de tag an album in iPhoto and upload it blank and then tag in facebook that wouldn't be so bad, but iPhoto is now auto tagging bunches and bunches of photos, correctly I'll admit, that are not linked to the correct FB profiles!

I have re downloaded and install the old facebook export module for iPhoto and will go back to using that since I could tag photos before they were uploaded with a correct link to the FB profile!

I've encountered an additional problem with tagging the photos in FB first. When the album synchronizes with iPhoto, some of the tags are lost (mainly, the ones where the face was not clearly recognizable in the photo) so I had to tag them again. But after I did, I opened iPhoto again, it automatically synchronized with FB again and eliminated the tags. Very frustrating!!

So I'm now trying to eliminate the FB album from iPhoto, but it won't let me deleted. I've tried and tried and nothing, still there. I've accomplished something by trying to delete the album from iPhoto, though. Now it won't let me upload any additional pictures. I'm running iPhoto 09 (8.0.4).

Any clues anyone?

It STILL doesn't work for shit. Even all these months later.

Try uploading more than twenty photos into a FB album from iPhoto. It will crash and then re-crash every time you go back into the album.

It works perfectly for me, as long as you have the right email address in.

oh my god... my iphoto is tagging 'kind of' okayish.
uploads it to facebook okay.
then looking through the pictures on facebook, it has replaced EVERY picture of me and tagged it as some guy who i met once and isnt even in my iphoto faces section because i have 1 PHOTO OF HIM.
it gets so annoying. just filled an album with photos and im not tagged in one.
have had enough.

its just taken to an album i uploaded a few weeks ago and changed me in them.
is this an actual problem or just shit?!

My iPhoto has gone back and retagged my best friend has a dude and the dude as my best friend on Facebook. It has updated all albums I uploaded to FB through iPhoto and all albums I put up now even though their full names and e-mail addresses are proper in the iPhoto Face card.

iPhoto (iLife'09) + Facebook FAIL

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