PSE 2018 Trouble with facial recognition of imported jpegs of scanned film negatives

Hi all,

I have been running PSE 2018 on a Windows 10 laptop for a little over a year and have spent my time primarily in the Organizer importing, cataloging, and tagging photos as a family photo archiving project. I haven't had any problems that I couldn't figure out until now with an issue in which Organizer doesn't seem to want to run people analysis on jpegs created from scanned film negatives.

I've not had any trouble with the facial recognition feature successfully running after importing older scanned photos and/or photos from digital cameras.  However, I just moved from working with imported scanned photos / direct from digital cameras to working with scanned film negatives.

I recently purchased an Epson Perfection v600 flatbed scanner so that I could scan old film negatives for the project.  Because there doesn't appear to be a feature or option that would allow me select 'film negatives' as the target scanned items directly from the scanner directly through the import option in PSE 2018's Organizer, I have scanned about 100 images from film negatives - 35mm color, black & white, and also a larger 'medium format' set of color negatives with the Epson scanning software. The Epson Scan software saves the resulting images as jpeg files.  Because the film negatives are decades old I have been scanning them in at a 'target size' in the Epson software of 4x6" and usually at 1200dpi resolution in order to maximize the quality of the scanned images.  The resulting scans from the film negatives are saved as JPEGs with practically no compression applied to them.

After scanning the first 100 or so images from the film negatives, I successfully imported all of the saved JPEGs into PSE 18's Organizer.  I noticed that Organizer did not automatically start to run the people finder / facial recognition feature following the import like it usually did with all other imports. I double checked in the "View" drop down menu and the People Recognition box is checked.

When I opened one of the newly imported scans of the negatives within Organizer and attempted to manually mark a face, I get a pop up box with a yellow triangle that states "People Analysis is yet to be performed on the selected media. Would you like to start the analysis now?" with a "yes" and "no" click box alternative.  I have repeatedly clicked "Yes" on that option with different pictures and even let the system & program alone 'untouched' for a few hours after doing so. However, I never saw a message in the bottom stating that the facial recognition process was "X" % done. Nor does it suggest any potential faces as needing to be marked in the new images. Finally, when I again attempt to manually mark a face in those files, I get the same pop up box message telling me that People Analysis has yet to be performed as before. As a result I don't seem to be able to do a workaround of manually tagging and labeling faces in those files.

I would be deeply appreciative for any help as to what I may need to do or change either in PSE 18's Organizer to get the facial recognition analysis figure to run on the newly imported files or alternatively if I have to change a particular setting in the Epson Scan software so that it saves the resulting file in a form that PSE 18 likes. I have several hundred and possibly a few thousand more film negatives and slides to scan and import so I'd like to figure out what needs to be fixed before I go any further with this aspect of the project.

As an aside, my current catalog has just shy of 55K photos in it with just under 400 named people identified.  Not surprisingly I really don't want to have to reset the facial recognition catalog and go through the process of recreating and re-tagging everyone in order to rebuild that.

Thank you in advance for any help!