Extract Aperture Faces

Extract images of faces found by Aperture 3.0 in your photographs.

(Version 1.0 -- Released 9/25/2011)

This MacOS application scans your Aperture Library and finds images of faces it has identified in your photographs. Aperture itself provides no way to extract these snapshots, although they can be seen when you click on the "Faces" panel in your library.

I created this app because I found that I had a lot of photographs of some people (e.g., my family) and the Aperture "faces" snapshots provided a cool way to see their expressions (especially my daughter over time.)

The app itself is very simple:

Given an Aperture Library (I've only tested Aperture 3.1.3 but I believe it should work with any Aperture 3.x version), and the name of a person whose face you've tagged, it lets you extract all of the images of that person, or a create a composite PDF with all of the images in a tiled format.

Here's an example of a composite picture of all 400+ pictures of me in my library:

Compatibility

I have only tested under MacOS 10.7 (Lion) on an Intel Mac. I believe it should run under MacOS 10.5 and 10.6 as well. I have also only tested with Aperture 3.1.3, but believe it should work with any version of Aperture 3 (when face recognition was introduced.)

Unfortunately, this app will not work with iPhoto library, because iPhoto uses a different format to represent its photo database. With some effort it might be possible to reverse engineer the iPhoto library format as I have done with Aperture.

Download

Download it from here.

Source Code

Source code is available as GoogleCode project. Follow instructions on this page to perform an anonymous svn checkout. If you would like to help with development, feel free to submit your patches to me.

Copyright Information

The Extract Aperture Faces appliation is Copyright 2011 Samuel Madden. It is free for use, and is licensed under the MIT Open Source License.

Please email me at madden@csail.mit.edu with questions or comments.