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Exciting_codecd1a
Participant
October 12, 2026
Question

Face Identification

I have a very large library i just imported around 100,000 photos and video. Facial recognition seems to have stopped identifying people. Since the beginning there were no real stacks of photos, the most stacked was 5. Suggestions seemed to work for a bit but since has stopped. I now have no new suggestions for confirmed people in many pictures, and about 7000 unidentified photos left many of which are already confirmed people. The faces are found and good quality but no suggestion is presented. I have to ID them one at a time. anything i can do to fix this?

    8 replies

    davidmaizil
    Participating Frequently
    October 14, 2026

    Sorry, scratch the Suggestion Count part. Try this instead: double-click one of your named people. Below Confirmed there's a Similar section with faces that look like them. Select the right ones and click the check mark to confirm them together.

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    Exciting_codecd1aAuthor
    Participant
    October 14, 2026

    I’ve already worked through all the similar faces provided, now under each confirmed person there are no similar ones listed, the section is gone. Just have the Unnamed ones when I look at my whole catalog.  I think that’s why it took me a minute to realize there was an issue because I had so many faces and suggestions, but as I worked through the faces and names I realized there are so many left with no suggestions at all.  Just 7000 faces with a ?.  I can go through and assign them a name, but it doesn’t trigger any additional recognition of other photos, it’s like I would just have to manually select or assign names one by one.

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    davidmaizil
    Participating Frequently
    October 15, 2026

    Then Classic has no more matches it's confident about, so it stops suggesting. You can still skip one-by-one: in Unnamed People, Cmd-click every face of the same person (sorting by Filmstrip Order keeps one shoot's faces next to each other), then drag the selection onto that person in Named People. That confirms the whole batch in one go.

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    davidmaizil
    Participating Frequently
    October 13, 2026

    Two things worth checking in People view while you gather what Sameer asked for:

    1. People view only shows faces from the source selected in the left panel. After a 100,000 photo import, select All Photographs in the Catalog panel first, otherwise it can look like suggestions are missing when they're just outside the current folder.

    2. In the toolbar, set Sort Unnamed By to Suggestion Count. That brings the stacks with a "?" name suggestion to the top. If the mode next to it is Manual Refresh, click the refresh button after confirming a batch so the Unnamed People section re-sorts.

    Full disclosure, I build Lightroom Classic plugins, and one of them, Face Tagger, came out of this exact problem on a big catalog: you train it on a few photos of a person and it adds that person's keyword to the photos it matches, all on your own machine. Mac on Apple Silicon only, though, and People view is free, so it's worth getting that working first.

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    Exciting_codecd1aAuthor
    Participant
    October 13, 2026

    Thanks for the suggestions! I am looking at the whole top level folder and did check out your option 2 but I only see sort by Suggested Name, Filmstrip Order, Stack Size and Popular names. I did not see Suggestion Count. I don’t have any stacks.

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    Exciting_codecd1aAuthor
    Participant
    October 12, 2026

    To confirm I am using Lightroom Classic 15.6

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    Sameer K
    Community Manager
    Sameer KCommunity Manager
    Community Manager
    October 13, 2026

    Hey, @Exciting_codecd1a. Welcome to the Lightroom Community. I'll need more information to help you figure this out.

    I've moved your post to Lightroom Classic for now. Please share the system info from Lightroom Classic: go to Help > System Info, copy and paste it into a text document,> Upload and attach it here. 


    Where do you keep your Lightroom Classic catalog? Has this happened only after you've updated to v15.6? Were these 7,000 images imported after the update?


    In Lightroom's Catalog Settings from the Edit Menu (Win), or the Lightroom Classic menu (macOS), go to Metadata & toggle the checkbox for 'Automatically detect faces in all photos', restart Lightroom Classic, and try again.


    Thanks!
    Sameer K
    (Type '@' and type my name to mention me when you reply)

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    Exciting_codecd1aAuthor
    Participant
    October 13, 2026

    I’ve attached the system info in the text file. The catalog is on my MAC but the actual photos are on an SSD external drive. Due to the size of the catalog I don’t have that much space on the MAC. I’ve only used lightroom classic for about a month. I do think it did an upgrade during that time but I cannot say for sure if that is related to when this started. I’d say it’s possible, but not with confidence.
    Also, I have 50,000 named faces now after working on this for a month, it seems like the 7000 unnamed are from 2013 and later (I’ve imported photos from 2002 through 2022). I’ve named so many but I think for sure it was recognizing faces from after 2013 at one point. But I can’t say whether it was after the update or not.

    I have tried the toggle checkbox a few times now, closing ane restarting, but no luck.

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