Study

iPhoto has a new feature -- face recognition. It will scan your photos, identify faces, and let you put in the names of the people. Even better, once you start putting names in, it will search the photos for that face and suggest that it's that person.

This has become obsessive for me. We just got a new computer, and I've finally put all of our digital photos in one place -- over 12,000 of them it turns out -- and I've spent a bunch of hours already obsessively naming faces.

This is entertaining for several reasons. When you attach some faces to a name, iPhoto will show you zoomed in views of all the photos of that person in one window in order of date taken. For our children, this is cool because you see them get older as the pictures go on. As you put in more names, the program gets better at identifying a particular person.

There are still some issues, though. I have a bunch of photos of my friend Kevin over the years, but since many are taken at the beach, he's wearing his sunglasses. So iPhoto identifies all people with sunglasses as Kevin. If a photo is of a person with a hat, it returns photos of people in hats.

The biggest decision I've had to make is who warrants a name? Certainly immediate family. Second cousins who we have about five pictures of? Jonah's hockey teammates? It's a tough call.

The most entertaining thing, though, is who the computer thinks people are. My nephew Zev is eight, but it will sometimes ask about my 70-ish uncle, "Is this Zev?" Stupid computer.