So I’ve been using iPhoto ’09 for about a week now, and I love their face recognition feature. For years, I’ve been meaning to use Keywords to tag people in my photos so that I can easily pull up all photos of a certain person, anytime.

I’m glad I never got around to that because iPhoto’s new Faces feature does all the hard work for me–it finds faces in my photo library (24,310 photos at last count). Then, provided it’s had some face recognition training, it’ll ask me if this face is Liz or Nancy or Adam. It’s been very easy and I’ve tagged 69 people so far, including myself in 831 pictures. The nice thing is once you’ve tagged a specific person in enough pictures, iPhoto will be very accurate in recognizing that person in any other photos. We’re talking about iPhoto finding me in 50 pictures in a row, without any mistakes!

How does iPhoto display all the people you’ve tagged? In their Faces Gallery–here’s a screenshot from Apple.

Looks wonderful, doesn’t it? Aside from having friends who double as impossibly ordinary-looking-yet-gorgeous models, we can tell that the user has about 14 people tagged so far in his or her iPhoto library. So far, so good.

But what happens when you have a lot of people tagged. Say, 69 friends?

(I know, it’s shocking. Suddenly the pictures are not so pretty or so uniformly sunny. That’s what happens when you have non-professionals snapping away with little point-and-shoot cameras.)

But notice that I can only see friends whose first names begin with A through G. I’ve now got 14 rows of friends to look through–more than 3 full screens to scroll through. Look at the scroll bar on the right side.

No problem. iPhoto lets you adjust the display size of photos/events/faces using a slider on the lower right corner. Here’s the photos again, at their smallest display size.

It’s not really that much better. It’s overwhelming to see so many faces at one time, all against a busy corkboard-patterned background. Plus, the font size doesn’t get smaller. It’s still a Marker Felt-esque font, 24 points. So now many of the names are cut off; see my name on the first row? “Adam Sto…” and it’s not even a long name. I feel sorry for Jennifer Cole-Regis or Amila Prasanna Kumara. And the font is terrible if you’re trying to scan quickly to find a specific name.

At least I can see 35 friends on one screen. I’ll still have to do a full scroll to see the rest of my friends (again, look at the scroll bar on the right). What happens when I go up to 100 friends? 200? Remember, I’ve got 24,000 pictures to look through full of college parties, DPHHs, and an entire Sri Lankan school. Of course I’m not tagging anybody–just those people whom I think I’ve got more than 20 pictures of (ain’t that a nice barometer?).

Clearly, the iPhoto designers over at Cupertino didn’t think about using iPhoto’s Faces feature beyond 20 tagged people. This is an example of not making design futureproof–the principle of thinking, “So my design will show about 10 rows of data; what happens in six months when I have 100 rows?”

What would work a lot better here is a List View. Fortunately, iPhoto’s deisgners have already implemented a similar view in their new Places Gallery:

I know nothing about application design but I’m guessing it’s trivial to apply the same List View to the Faces Gallery. And as a bonus, we should be able to categorize our tagged people. Say, separate them into “Family,” “Friends,” “College,” “Australians,” and so on. But right now I’d settle for a simple list of all the people I’ve tagged, nothing fancy.

I’ve typed this post in hopes that an iPhoto programmer might come across it and incorporate a List View for iPhoto’s Faces Gallery in a iLife ’09 update (I don’t think this feature should wait until iPhoto ’10).

In the meantime, it’s back to the hard, but fun work of tagging everyone whose visible light projection has passed through my camera’s aperture.