How Good is Windows Live Photo Gallery’s Face Recognition?

So I work on Windows Live Photo Gallery and I have thousands upon thousands of photos at home. The latest release of Photo Gallery, 2011, adds Face Recognition to help you tag people in your photos. As you tag someone, it builds up enough confidence to start suggesting that person is in other photos. You can go into Batch Face Tagging and quickly confirm the correct suggestions and then be able to quickly find those pictures later by the person’s name.

The previous version had Face Detection, which is an important foundation to being able to do Face Recognition (you can’t attempt to recognize a face if you can’t detect that there’s a face there). But in that previous version, you had to go and manually, photo by photo, say who the person was. I did this. Over and over again. Until I got tired.

When I installed the latest version of Photo Gallery at home back in 2010, it used all those manually tagged faces as the basis of finding more matches. Below are the initial results. Dude, it found faces of me from when I was three and up, including those pre-beard adult days. It did the same finding pictures of my father, mother, and brother.