P: Please add face recognition to Lightroom (ability to specify region metadata)

I have not used facial recognition tools and found the above conversation fascinating. My only reservations are that the technology does not appear to be reliable at this point and that LR still has basic stuff to get right, such as the keywording and performance rendering previews.

This seems to me to be an ideal function to be addressed by a third party addin.

It would be an excellent tool. At this point I use Picasa to detect and tag people but unfortunately the work around is not good for DNGs. I work events, set photography for films and publicity and face detection would save me lots of time. I even considered to migrate to Apple Aperture but the face detection in Picasa was better and the tools easier to use.

Please implement it.

My PSE9 catalog contains over 99,000 images. A large number of these photos are of youth soccer players from a variety of teams, and many photos contain multiple faces (e.g. team photos). As many players are unknown to me, it is very helpful to tag a face with a player's name, and to find all photos (e.g. action photos) containing that player.

Yes, at first PSE9's face recognition appears to work substantially better than PSE8. However, my experience is that it simply stops working after some number of images are processed. If you re-run Find->Find People For Tagging, nothing happens. Worse, other features are impacted: you cannot use F11 for full screen (must exit and restart app), and you must re-load thumbnails for many images (right click->Update Thumbnail, may or may not work).

Interesting. I just gave Elements 9 a try. It did slightly better than Windows Live Photo Gallery, missing fewer of the ones wearing sunglasses. It still missed a lot of the profile and partial face shots, but it also ran by-far the fastest at about 1.5 minutes for the same set of images, and it only took about half an hour to manually add the ones it missed. Interesting, especially given how badly Elements 8 did on a completely different set of images.

"From my experience : picasa is doing a much better job you Should try it. "

Okay, I tried Picasa on the same images.

It did much, much worse than Windows Live Photo Gallery, it was slower, harder to use, and very buggy. It missed a lot more really obvious faces it had no reason to miss plus it missed all the one WLPG missed too.

Took half an hour to scan the faces versus ten minutes, and would have taken at least 10 hours to manually enter them all versus 2.5 hours. I gave up and uninstalled it.

Note that part of the job could be done outside lightroom.
more and more camera have this feature, to adjust focus on the faces, even dslr (in live view mode). some of them store this info in metadata. So if lightroom could read that, this could help save computing time?

Yes, and I gave up on this as well...Too much work to bring it back to lightroom.

"I think this is a difficult problem and I don't see a way to overcome it." - this is the crux of innovation. Adobe needs to find/acquire/dedicate the resources to make this possible.

To Eric's comment: Picasa is a good alternative for now, but the workflow is a large burden. I used Picasa to index photos, recognize faces and then added standard Keywords for those images. In LR, I had to re-read metadata from this files and then assign the "Person Shown" in IPTC metadata. Ridiculous

From my experience : picasa is doing a much better job you Should try it.
Saved me several weeeks of work. But it also has difficulties to detect profile...

I decided to take a second look at face recognition after my disastrous first test with PS Elements 8. I tried out Windows Live Photo Gallery's version.

I gave it a folder of about a thousand images, pretty much all of them of people (my kids, mostly). It took about 10 minutes, and came up with a bunch of faces for me to identify. That took a few minutes. Done right?

I then went through image-by-image and had a look. It missed about 75% of the people in the images, not identifying them as faces at all. This seemed to be caused by the fact that the full face wasn't in the image, either in profile, partially obstructed, wearing sun glasses, or something else.

I then proceeded to manually do what it hadn't done. It took a little over two hours.

Since I had to touch each image manually anyway, I estimate that the face recognition technology only saved me a few minutes over doing the whole thing myself manually.

I think this is a difficult problem and I don't see a way to overcome it.