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

So there are 2 issues here:
1) image region metadata- implement this immediately. You (Adobe) decided on a standard in Nov 2010. It's useful for tagging people (Grampa, Grampa's brother Chuck), items (Grampa's childhood tricycle) and location information that isn't obvious from GPS data (the house Grampa grew up in).

We as a society are taking, editing, sharing, archiving, whatever-ing photos at an astonishing rate. If we want all these pictures to be anything other than digital garbage to peers and future generations, we need to identify what we're taking pictures of in ways that our audience (family, friends, clients, students, historians, colleagues, etc) can use.

If I were Adobe, I wouldn't let an employee write code for any other feature until this was implemented. The standards and framework have been in place for years. JUST DO IT.

2) facial recognition- the holy grail of image region metadata is, I'm sure, for it to intelligently tag itself with relevant information. Users shouldn't have to manually identify Grampa, the software should just identify Grampa automatically. That's a great idea but it's a bonus that makes image region metadata quicker and easier to apply. I'm sure Adobe is working on this and I'm sure they want it to be excellent but in the mean time PLEASE give me the ability to tag faces manually while you work on how to do it automatically.

At the very least, at least add the ability to show embedded XMP-MP data (which I believe Adobe jointly developed with Microsoft for person metadata in photos...)

This is more a vote-for than a new idea I guess. I'd really like to see this feature in Lightroom. Good examples are products such as iPhoto or Google Picasa.

I have approaching 20K photos in Photoshop Elements. I've face tagged many of this pictures because it allows me to identify individuals in group shots. In some cases, I've taken my computers to family events and gotten assistance from older relatives in identifying people in early 20th century pictures. I'd love to upgrade to Lightroom but will not walk away from face tagging as it is a critical part of my photo archiving activity. Changing to Lightroom is a non-starter until it can preserve all PSE metadata.

Hi Eugene;

I understand how keywords and tags could work, but...keywords do not help when there are already thousands of photos without tags in the application database. Face recognition would be a fantastic tool for making the first cut at sorting the archive, and then additionaly applying names and keywords.

Kent Green

When I import a batch of photos, I will go through each one and tag names as keywords of individuals present in each. I have smart collections built to each person's name. So then if I want to find and pull up all the photos of a particular person, I simply open their collection. At the same time, I also tag events and sometimes even objects. For example, my dad's birthday I will tag with:

Year, Birthday Dad, Dad's Name

Thereby I can pull up specifically his photos, or photos of the event. This allows me to keep my photos organized in folders by date, but still have individual events tagged, and individual people.

I also have a lot of photos of my sister's twin babies. All babies already look identical, it's even harder when they're actually identical. I would like to be able to use a location tag, and tag each individual twin with their proper name so that 20 years from now I can go back and confidently say who is who.

Note 2
we should also be able (or the software should be able to do it automatically) disable a face for the training data (training the computer to recognize other faces of the same person).
Indeed I should be able to select a face taken in very bad conditions where, I only, can know it is a face. for example some portraits in very contrasted light, where you may only guess silhouettes,... or even the back of someone head, or some head half or fully hidden by some objects,...or worse part of the body that is not a face because the face happens to be hidden but I still want to remember who was the photographed person (ok that is not intended to be used like this but I am sure some including me will)
And finally we should be able to move/resize the region. I hate it when PICASA recognize someone, but the region it draws is so big that it includes other smaller faces in. These faces cannot be tagged afterwards, since they are part of an already tagged region!

Since adobe seem to be working on the feature, just a short note to be sure that they handle all cases:
I have recently had (for the second time) a problem with 2 persons having the exact same name (family name and first name identical)
If I use keyword for persons name, I can only create 1 keyword. Which means that when I filter the photo by this keyword, I will find both persons, which is not what I want. I would like to be able to create 2 times the same keyword.
But I am OK if it is not possible with keyword.
However, when we will be able to tag faces, I really hope we can create 2 or more face tag with the exact same names( but representing different people)
This is possible in PICASA
regards

I will definitely never purchase an upgrade if will not include facial recognition

Stefano

Face recognition will probably be in Lr6 (Adobe has definitely been working on it) - but don't quote me ;-}.