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

"By the way the anoying thing with PICASA and IPTC: person shown is that there is no hierarchy"

Lightroom could still add hierarchy without it being IPTC-supported (as it does with collections for instance). The trouble is, family structures are often messy, and can be fluid over time.

no they don't. At least in the version I use,I did not checked if it got updated.
By the way the anoying thing with PICASA and IPTC: person shown is that there is no hierarchy
-> whenyou have 1000 of names it becomes a real pain to find the one you need for tagging (though PICASA lets you type it and auto complete, which helps a lot)

Understood, though I suspect I also misread you! Do you know if Picasa uses existing IPTC as part of the algorithm? I can see why it would make sense (and fit LR's style), but I hadn't seen an example of software doing this.

You're right and I've confused the issue... For EXISTING metadata (e.g. IPTC:Person Shown, Keywords) of photos I'd like the algorithm/interface to give great weight to those edits I've already made for those fields. When "tagging" a Face on the photo, I think it should be stored in IPTC:Person Shown field.

I really would not want face recognition data in keywords. There's a proper IPTC field - Person Shown - and that's what should be used.

Presentation is very important and something Picasa has got right (even over iPhoto). The annoying thing about Picasa Face recognition is that you can't tweak anything, or even tell if it's still running... until you suddenly get new results (try the Grouping Faces feature)

LR integration with Keywords is crucial, and possibly a way to integrate EXISTING Keywords to help with the detection would be great.

I typically take have a shooting spree where I have taken dozens of photos with the same people, so presenting that / building an algorithm should prefer that I would hope.

First a face detection would be OK
-> I mean just detect faces with out saying who is there can help a lot.
Then add face recognition

But the most important thing is to be able to tag an image region (like a face for instance)
1. Start to make it general : ability to associate a region (saved in xmp) with a Keyword (normal kind of keyword we have already)
2. then these Keywords can be used for face taging
3. then in the database some of these keywords can be associated to face characteristic allowing an algorithm to make face recognition.

Finally the most important in face recognition is not how well the algorithm performs, but how well results are presented so that you can easily correct any errors or validate good guess.
Maybe we can group faces by similarities (with a given threshold) like Picasa seem to do.
A same person may then appear in different such group (because the person got older, or ...) and a same keyword (person keyword for instance) would then be associated with 2 or more face characteristic. this way we can eleminate the problems of photoshop element who get worse at guessing people faces when you have tagged too many faces of the same person (old faces pollute the ability to detect youger faces and vice versa)
regards
Eric

@bend: Well Put

I'm all for this IF sufficient Dev resources are committed to to it's being implemented well. In other words, if it's going to be half-assed, don't bother. There's plenty of other things to tweak and improve closer to LR's core functions.

If Adobe decides to add face recognition, I hope they do a better job than they did with Photoshop Elements, which had severe problems with its recognition.