Does the Lightroom facial recognition learn?

[trinko]

I've got a huge catalog of digitized photos and I'm trying to use facial recognition to tag them.

Unfortunately the program does only a so so job.  I'm wondering if as i confirm or deny Lightroom guesses as to the identity the person does the facial recognition get better, i.e. after say labeling 100 photos "George Smith" will Lightroom do a better job at identifying the other 650 photos automatically?  If so do I have to do anything to get the program to retry unidentified faces?

If not is there a third party product that is better for facial recognition?  I don't relish spending ages IDing photos one by one.

Thanks for any help!

[Akash Sharma]

Hi Trinko,

Thanks for posting on Adobe forums.

I'd recommend that you check out this article for all the details related to how Lightroom recognizes, index and tag faces in your Lightroom library: Use Intelligent facial recognition in Lightroom Classic CC

Thanks,

Akash

[trinko]

Thanks but I already read that article and it doesn't say that the facial recognition software gets better as it has more training on images.  Is that correct? 

Is it true that the facial rec software is no more accurate after training than before?

Seems kinda behind the state of the art if that's the case.

[tkcent]

Also, what happens if a photo is removed from the database?  Does the information used to train the facial recognition stay in the database?  We are looking at using Lightroom as part of a workflow to identify faces in photos but the photos may not remain in Lightroom since the volume of photos we process is too large.

Thanks!

[Ian Lyons]

The success rate of facial recognition in Lightroom Classic does improve with time/use. That being said, and as you've already remarked, the initial success rate isn't great.

[Roni Ziv]

After I confirm some thousands of face regions how do I instruct LR to reidentify faces in the unnamed people face regions?

[jbrouwer]

Did you ever find an answer to your question, Roni? I have the same question. 

[johnrellis]

"After I confirm some thousands of face regions how do I instruct LR to reidentify faces in the unnamed people face regions?"

You can select a batch of photos and do Library > Find Faces Again.  This will throw away any face rectangles and assigned names on the selected photos. But unless you use the command to discard a large number of assigned names, doing Find Faces Again won't change LR's suggested names.  Given the same inputs, it will generate the same outputs.

[jbrouwer]

Thanks for your help, John. Let me ask a more specific question. Say I have a picture of a large group -- 20 people at a wedding or something. Lightroom finds all the faces, and I go through and correct or approve Lightroom's suggestions. But I took a dozen frames of this same group. I go to the next photo, of the same group, and there are all Lightroom's original suggestions. Is there no way to ask Lightroom to reanalyze this photo, taking into account the corrections and approvals I made on the first photo, of the same group? Otherwise, I will have to correct/approve Lightroom's suggestions in every one of the dozen photos I have of this same group -- very inefficient. 

[johnrellis]

LR definitely changes its suggestions in response to previous assignments of names you make. But I've observed that it may take many additional assignments of correct names for LR to change its guesses about a particular person.  Correcting one suggestion for a person is usually not enough.

Also, I don't know how often it updates those suggestions, and I don't recall ever seeing any authoritative statements about that.  You might have to exit and re-enter People view to get it to reflect its updated guesses at names.

[jbrouwer]

Thanks again, John, that's very helpful info.