I have about 14,000 pictures in my iPhoto library. Almost all of them are pictures of people: digital photos going back 10 years, scans going back over 40 years.
I installed iPhoto 09. I was really excited about the face matching feature.
But two things happened:
iPhoto kept locking up at first, then would lock my Mac in a black screen (as if the screen saver was trying to start.) It would stay locked up like this for 20 minutes or more; I had to power cycle to get things back. If I ran activity monitor (before the screen went black), iPhoto appeared to be scanning every single photo in my library at a rate of about 1 per second.
Eventually, I managed to get iPhoto to start and not lock stuff up. Then it spent about 4 hours processing faces from the library. So I went to bed. Today, none of the photos in the library have a face frame on them. If I add one, it is forgotten when iPhoto restarts. No worky. I'll have to stick with Lightroom.
Update: it turns out the upgrade of my iPhoto Library completely borked my Library. iPhoto thinks the "permissions" are wrong and is asking me to repair them. All the files are owned and writable by me, but they are on an external (Firewire 800) disk. So I have no idea what to fix. Standard lesson applies: back up your entire iPhoto Library before upgrading. I have a backup, but by this time it's been overwritten by the nightly backup job, so now I have a backup of the fucked library. I don't use Time Machine. It doesn't work when you have 2.5 TB of shit.
I might just recreate the iPhoto Library from scratch, which sucks because I have some useful metadata in there.
Update 2: I made a backup, then I deleted two files: face.db and face_blob.db. Then I started up iPhoto, and it recreated the face database. I also copied the entire Library to my local disk, instead of having it on a direct firewire-attached drive. It's no longer complaining about wrong permissions. So it's working for me now, recognizing faces. Whew!
