iPhoto Faces and Facebook

I’ve been a generally big fan of iPhoto, it does what I need and in my opinion it does it well. I can quickly skim my photos and show them off. iPhoto ‘09 detected hundreds, if not thousands, of faces correctly. I put in their names and tidied up the lingering untagged faces.

Uploading to Facebook sounded great, it will automatically tag the same faces in the photos it synchronises. Now ‘automatic’ is a great word. It conjures up a lot of meaning. The top of the list (as suggested by Apple’s own dictionary) is “working by itself with little or no direct human control”. Yes! That’s what I want in life; At least from my software.

So imagine my surprise after spending a few hours tagging faces in iPhoto to learn that I now needed to get the emails of the people I tagged. WHAT?

I have precisely one friend on Facebook called Aaron and I have exactly one person in iPhoto called Aaron. In my mind a piece of software should be able to work out that maybe I have just one connection I know in my life called Aaron, and that perhaps these two identities refer to that single friend of mine. That is automatic.

What I am presented with isn’t even the next step down; Which would have been to present me with a list of people I know on Facebook and let me pick which Facebook friend my iPhoto tag refers to. That would be acceptable, though a little annoying.

However, I must enter my friend’s email address. Yes, email. People have many different email addresses these days, how do I pick the right one? I have to go through each of my friend’s pages and go to their information and copy the email address? Well that’s annoying.

Except I don’t. Because the email addresses aren’t text, they’re images, so I can’t copy them across. I must have both windows near each other (or a fairly good memory) so I can “manually” copy the email addresses into iPhoto.

This is the worst act of “claims to be automatic” I’ve seen from Apple in some time.

And I also wonder what will happen if they change their email address on Facebook.