I just received my copy of iLife ‘09 from Amazon this morning, and I am very impressed so far with the new iPhoto’s ability to track faces. That’s not to say it isn’t a little rough around the edges, but it does do an admirable job of picking up people, animals, and even statues.

I wasn’t too surprised to find that after labeling ”Abraham Lincoln” once, it identified him flawlessly across the rest of the statues. What did surprise me though, was finding that it also labeled the wax figure of Abraham Lincoln from a trip to Las Vegas, even though the face looks vastly different from the original, marble one I had initially labeled.

After confirming and labeling a handful of pictures of Abraham Lincoln, I found this as a suggested image of him, from a book I had taken a picture of months ago. Now that is cool!

For those wondering why I would have a photo of a book on Lincoln in the first place, I occasionally take pictures of books and other items that I intend to purchase for people at a later date, and this happened to be one of them.

Now, with all of the coolness of the facial recognition, there are a few odd bits to note. For one, it does arbitrarily find faces every once and a while, such as Mickey Mouse’s elephant cousin in this picture.

And even though it caught that elephant, I found that it did have a very hard time concluding that Mickey Mouse is, in fact, Mickey Mouse. No matter how many times I labeled images as “Mickey Mouse,” it never did find a suggested image other than the ones I had labeled.

I think the big, non-face like face of Mickey prevented iPhoto from discerning it from other background objects. So, this means that you aren’t likely to be able to pinpoint say, your car and have it picked up in each photo that it appears in, but maybe that’s for the best. It is for faces, after all.

I’d love to hear your experiences, leave a comment and let me know what you’ve found!