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ian277289366mnz
Participant
December 28, 2022
Question

Photoshop Elements 2022 - missing People Faces

  • December 28, 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 237 views

Hi - a year or so ago I upgraded from an earler version of Elements and after a bit of a struggle all was fine. I spent some time correctly naming the faces it had identified. All fine.

 

Today my girlfriend reported a problem to me while i was out. I cant be sure exactly what happened, but seems as though it lost its reference to the db or some other file it was expecting to locate on startup. As it was asking for a serial key, I googled, and found in the Adobe site a 'password recovery key tool' which i thought might fit the problem since as far as i was concerned it ought to know it was a valid, licenced install already. I dont know whether that tool changed anything it shouldnt have but did not make any noticable affect as I still couldnt log in.

 

Eventually i found the original activation key in te purchae email and entered this so the application would run up. I then repointed it to the db location and all seemed to be back to normal. Hurrah!

 

But then I checked the People section where the facial ID stuff is. This appears to be in a slightly broken state where it has many suggested people, but all of them are represented with the default grey circle. It has however remembered the related media because if i click, it shows me the dozen of related photos that the faces came from.

 

So it seems as though the only thing broken is the circular face icons.

 

Hope my problem explanation makes sense. I checked in the preferences but didnt see any file path i thought related to this.

 

Any suggestions?

 

Thanks

Ian

 

 

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

Greg_S.
Community Expert
Greg_S.Community Expert
Community Expert
December 28, 2022

Thanks for the detailed explanation, Ian.  It's a little difficult to figure out what may have happened, but let's see if we can meet your needs. 

First, I'm assuming that you have both your photos and your catalog folder on your NAS.  As you already know, Adobe does not recommend this setup, particularly with a Wi-Fi NAS.  So, if possible, I would at least copy the catalog folder to a computer hard drive, preferably internal but external would be OK.  You will then have a backup of the folder on your NAS.  It is this folder that contains all of the face recognition information that matches faces with the photos. 

 

If the Organizer couldn't find the catalog on the NAS (because it was not turned on), it would not have opened in a different vanilla state.  I believe it would have thrown up a message that the (last used) catalog could not be found and would then have opened the Catalog Manager dialog to find a catalog to open.

 

Now, for me, although I am OCD about naming People in my catalog, I am only interested in using face recognition to tag people in photos.  I then use the Organizer's other search capabilities to find those photos.  I do not, for example, go to the Named People room and view the faces there.  If I want to find all photos of Mom, I use the Tags panel in the main media grid and check the box for Mom.  If this fulfills your needs, we can stop there.   
However, you may want to check that all photos of Mom have retained their People tags. If you click on Mom's stack in the Named People room and then click the Media link under the name, do thumbnails of all the photos appear?

 

And one other thought that I probably should have mentioned first - have you tried to Repair and Optimize the catalog, using the buttons in the Manage Catalogs dialog?

 

And, finally,  do you have any recent backups of your catalog?

Greg_S.
Community Expert
Greg_S.Community Expert
Community Expert
December 28, 2022

Was your girlfriend working in Elements when the problem started?  Or did she mess up something else on your computer?  😉

 

Can you give us as much detail as you can about what happened including any information about error messages that may have popped up.  You say you had to repoint the Organizer to the db.  How did you do this?  And are you sure you opened the right catalog?  Do you have more than one catalog for each version of Elements on the computer and do you have the earlier version still installed on the computer?

 

Are any files in the problem catalog missing?  Go to Find>All missing files and are there any results?

 

Are the generic icons found in the Named or Unnamed tab of the People room or in both?

 

I
ian277289366mnzAuthor
Participant
December 28, 2022

Hi Greg, thanks for responding. Here's what I think I know...

 

we only really use the Organiser, not the Editor.

she wasn't doing anything else, just wanted to look at pictures of her mum to remember her.

Our setup has the db set to be on our NAS (since read this is not recommended, so maybe I'll choose to revise this, although it's always been how I use it so I have some resiliency).

 

she says she had to turn the NAS on (shouldn't have been turned off, can't explain that, perhaps a power cut at some point I didn't realise)

So it's quite possible Elements started up and found it didn't have a db to find so (speculating now) defaulted to a more vanilla state.

when she opened the application it said 'not licenced, please launch editor to enter licence info'. Followed by a screen to enter the serial number we got when I purchased the '22 version.

she stopped at that point.

 

when I got home I started from the point it was some kind of bug rather than a lost preferences file that didn't know the correct file path anymore. Hence the tool I found and used as described earlier (no idea what it did if anything).

 

when that didn't work I found the original licence code and then via Manage Catalogs I selected the correct db location from a specifically named folder that I had created after I finished the migration earlier in the year.

 

no - no missing files. Only fault I've found is the missing people's faces in the 'Named' half of that section.

 

speculating completely - seems to me like a preferences files was lost or overwritten when the network location of the db file was missing on startup. There was no option to revert to the previous network location once the network location existed again.

if that is a reasonable hypothesis, and I've not followed best practice then fair enough, but would still be useful to know if there's a simple restore for the missing faces. If not I'll do it again at some point.

 

thanks.

 

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