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

Given that face recognition will probably not be in Lr4, I wonder if a 3rd-party plugin writer will step up. Its easy and fast to pull image data from the previews to analyze. If there's a command-line app to do the recognition, the plugin would be fairly easy to write... - The quality of results would be at the mercy of the command-line app of course...

Begs two questions:
- is there a good enough command-line app?
- would people use the plugin, or just continue to do without until native?

Rob

seriously ... WE NEED face detection in LR4 with a NICE user interface like Picaso 3 ....The interface in PS10 Catalog is terrible.... I have 30,000 pictures and on each one where it says "Who am I", I have to type the entire name....when the suggestions aren't correct (most time) ....whereas in Picaso, if I start to type Bob, when I type the letter B, it gives me all the names starting with B and I click the name.
The option should be an option to deal with people concerned with privacy issues....they can turn it off.
Facial recognition is NOT a consumer only feature but something professionals need also !!!!

From Tom Hogarty's interview: "Lightroom involve: "...privacy controls, integration with third party solutions like Facebook..." Why on earth would we like to integrate our LR lib face detection data with FB. Why we can't just get a tagging tool with decent FR and leave it there. If someone decides to create FB plugin for integration that's an separate issue.

We could add:
The thing is people always tagged (up to know using keyword only and not image region+keyword) people in photos and it won't stop. Auto tagging is just a tool.
It is like with knife
should we forbide knife because they can be used to kill
well no . This would be annoying for people that use them to cook, and people that may use them to kill will just use something else.
Should we avoid automatic face detection in LR
well I do not think so, this will keep "annoying" people that want to use it as a cataloging tool, this will not stop people that want to tag you on the web, as they will use other tools such as facebook, picasa, google+,...
regards

I would even say that adding this function to LR will make privacy problem less important than today!
Why?
simply look at what they have done with geotagging

up to today I used to geotagg all of my photo outside lightroom, and when exporting them I had to option strip all of the metadata or keep all including private geotagged position. So my photo that were directly exported on the web had the position in them because I did not want to strip all of the metadata. (there are plugins that helps you do a better job - but not everybody knows about those)
Today LR4 let you define private position that will never get exported, or provide an option not to export any position.

Don't you think that the same thing will happen if face tagging is included?

Regards

Well, interesting to hear this internal things. But also sad, as I really hoped to see that. As somebody else stated, the privacy issue is no issue to me: Now I do it manually, which is the same amount of information in the metadata but much much more work. Even a FR with say 90% accuracy would reduce my work by 90% (ok +- false positives and so on but hey, also 8% is nice).

best

Michael

Is it going to make it in LR4?
No idea but here is an interesting interview with Tom Hogarty on Dpreview

One feature that some users had hoped to see in Lightroom 4 is face recognition, in which the software identifies specific faces in images and embeds this information as metadata for easier image searches. Hogarty says that when allocating resources for a new release, highest priority is given to features that benefit the greatest number of users. 'Face recognition is very important to some', he says, 'but irrelevant to others, leading to [internal] debates about what solutions are tackled in a release cycle.' Perhaps even more important, he notes there are serious privacy concerns about, 'the ability of software solutions to collect person-specific information.' He says that the challenges in implementing a face recognition workflow in Lightroom involve: 'privacy controls, integration with third party solutions like Facebook, tolerance for false positives - and the effort required to correct them - as well as the time required [by the user] to teach recognition tools.'

So instead of having a full featured face recognition couldn't we have at least
-Region Tagging
-face detection (detect faces but not who does the face belong to)
This would at first greatly help the tagging process, with little recognition errors (less than trying to recognise who is who) and no privacy issue as the software does not automatically recognise people, just make it simpler for people to catalog photos with people on them (which photograph already do, today, anyway)
Regards
Eric

Please add this to LR. Even if it does not work properly it would be nice addition and start of a future development. This could be refined in each release like other features. Just the ablity to recognize a face and manually tag images would be great or search parameter "people in images".

- It is 2012, everybody has it, including PSE -> it is doable (probably quite easily as adobe has the technology
- It makes life easier -> that what LR is all about!
- It is not dangerous, as people already use keywords for it -> perhaps even more secure, e.g. a small checkbox "do not export personal metadata" on export

-> Do it! I really miss it!

What about LR4
It would be nice to have it in the final release