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Whilst I'm a happy LR Classic user for my professional work when it comes to one aspect of it I'm a novice: face recognition.
I've recently imported all of my own personal family photos. I've got photos of my parents and grandparents, myself, my wife, her family, our children, and at all ages. Unsurprisingly it might detect a photo of me as a child as myself, as my siblings, as my children, or as my father. Similarly it sees group photos from family weddings and events and tries to tag loads of people that I don't care about.
I've been going through confirming people, and/or adjusting them to the correct people, and/or deleting recognised faces - whether they are shapes in stone walls or people that are in the background of photos that I don't know.
I appreciate that the recognition improves as one does more confirmations/rejections/adjustments. What I wonder though is, is there a way to tell LR to "go and have another look at the ones you guessed at earlier to see if you can make a better guess now".
I don't want it to re-find all the "people I don't care about" and try to guess them. Nor do I want it to re-assess all the people I've confirmed as being someone specific. I'd just like to get it to look at the section called "Unnamed People" and have another go at working out who they might be!
Is that possible?
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Trying to understand questions- I will give it a go:
" to get it to look at the section called "Unnamed People" and have another go at working out who they might be!"
I select specific folders (not 'All Photographs') and click the [Face] icon, From there it shows me two panels- [Named People] and [Unnamed People]. This gives me the opportunity to add names to those [Unnamed...] in the lower panel. Select the check mark to add the suggested name, or click the suggested name to change to another.
"go and have another look at the ones you guessed at earlier to see if you can make a better guess now".
Likewise, I look in the [Named People] top section and correct any that need to be changed.
Also consider that people you have recognized with 'face recognition' are added to a Keyword that is flagged as being a "Person" keyword. So in the Keyword List panel you can search people with a person keyword (filter for "People" at the top of the panel) and add or remove names from the Keyword list (even if you are not in a Face Recognition mode).
I also have a parent Keyword "WHO" that is marked so that all 'Person' keywords appear under this parent KW.
I also name people in LrC in the format 'SURNAME_Firstname'. This might not be common with others but it makes it darn easier to select names from a 'preselect list' to add or change. eg. If I know the person belongs to a "SMITH" family- I type "sm" and all the "Smiths", "Smithers", "Smithes", show up in the preselect list.
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Rob, thanks for having a go at the question - neither version was what I was after! I'll try to explain again as evidently I wasn't clear enough.
The screen-shot is interesting as I hadn't come accross that at all and wouldn't have looked at that aspect either.
Let's try again.
I've a folder, not "all photos" but let's call it "Our Family". Lots of sub-folders by year and so on.
At the start I selected my folders at the Our Family level and told it to detect faces. This is unfortunately a huge job because there are lots of images to crunch and many of them include other people - for example if you take a shot of your family at a tourist spot there are other tourists with faces, which LR locates and then suggests for you to name. There are also weddings and Christenings where, whilst I know some of the folk, I don't know others (and may not care to name them if I do know them because I'm looking at my own family).
As one goes through naming individual faces the "top half" (the "named people" section) starts to populate with the names that one has identified. The "bottom half" (the "un-named people" section) variously fills up with names of people for some and questionmark for others. Note that it fills up... and that's part of the magic... and what I'm trying to get to.
Let's say we've got three people: Mark, Matt, Martin. They are relatives and get confused by the system as it tries to identify them. The "bottom half" of the view, with suggested names and question marks, has a list of names which are quite probably wrong. Martin gets identified as Matt, Matt gets identified as Martin, Mark gets identified as both Matt and Martin, and so on. That's fair enough. I go through and start to correct that "initial identification".
As this is all AI learning of what people look like one presumes that it learns as it goes along. And yet the grid of names never seems to change. It filled up initially and then it... stopped changing.
In my case I've found that photos of my son get identified as me or as my father. I get identified as my father or my son (depending on the age of the person in the photo). Indeed I also get identified as either of my siblings.
Personally I can look at a photo of my sister as a toddler and know it is her and not me, and vice versa. Not so certainly as a baby - then I go for context of who else is in the photo and where it was taken and what does the image look like in terms of film visual.
As I go through correcting discrepencies like that I can imagine that LR gets better at its job of "initial identification". As such if I were to choose a new folder and tell it to identify people I might hope that it gives a better "initial identification" of the people involved and the "unnamed people" section might more closely identify those in the images.
However I've already done a scan of the "Our Family" folder to ask it to identify people and guess at their names. It took a while, and as I said, it detected faces that I don't care to identify and would discard.
What I'm therefore wondering is if there is some way to tell Lightroom itself to look again at the remaining "unnamed people" section and for it to have another guess at those based on what it now knows about the people that I have already identified. Can it match Mark/Matt/Martin any better than it did the first time through?
I don't want to re-scan the lot, just the ones I've not identified yet to see if its suggestions improve.
From what I've seen there is no option for that. However, as I'm new to this area of the tool I figured it's worth asking as it would save me a lot of time - particularly when it gets to the baby photos that exist for most of my family in there.
Does that make my question any more clear?
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"...more clear?" I think I am as unsure as you are.
I do not find that recognition gets any better after repeated runs of Face recogintion.
I just did Face recognition on 'All Photographs' and saw hundreds 'Unnamed' with the same suggested name 'Jon Baker'- men women and children. So I don't trust the AI very much (probably as many others don't also). Stopping and restarting Face Detection did not change this suggested name, neither did closing and re-opening the catalog..
Family similarities also appear for me. (father like son, etc). So I guess that would be expected (I look like my dad!).
I just work my way along a line of ' Unnamed People' faces, accepting a tick, changing a name (where my format 'SURNAME_Firstname' is useful.), or-
Clearing Unnamed people into the Named panel by using the "Unknown" person name (typing "UN" preselects "Unknown". They will all show in the Keyword list as "Unknown".
It is a tedious and un-rewarding task, best approached by selecting one folder at a time for Face Detection.
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Thanks, @Rob_Cullen that's the conclusion I'd come to before I started asking here. I select multiples and correct one and hit the tick so I've rattled through thousands, but there's still lots to get done.
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Hey @Malthouse Photography & @Rob_Cullen,
I reached out to the team to see if there was a way to do this and someone suggested:
Library > Find Faces Again to re-run face detection.
Let me know if this is helpful.
^CM
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@CMass Very helpful, thankyou. There is always more to learn about these apps. I seldom use the top menus, preferring keyboard shortcuts, so obviously I have more to find there.
This will be the correct answer for @Malthouse Photography
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@CMass Yes, I've seen that too, but it isn't what I want. I did come accross that some time ago and tried it but it results in the wrong answer to my question.
As it says, it will discard all those existing face regions and re-run the detection. It can skip those that one has manually confirmed faces on - or not. It can't do what it really needs to do.
Let me explain.
I've got a folder with just 24 scans of family photos in it. Within those scans I identified six people that I know.
Several of the photos are army squad photos. I deleted all the squaddies that are not a relative - i.e. identifying just the soldier that I know to be family. Some don't appear to have any relatives in so they'd get looked at whether I've ticked the "skip photos that include manually confirmed faces" or not.
If I "Skip photos that have not run face detection previously" it will skip "new" photos but all my photos in these folders have had face detection run on them anyway so that doesn't change things.
Having re-run the tool I've now got 60 or so more faces to delete again. I didn't want it to "find" faces again. I wanted it to have another look at the faces that I had not yet decided upon and see if it could have a better analysis of those and maybe put a name on them.
If I were to re-run over all my family photos it would simply find hundreds and hundreds of background faces again and I'd be going through them a second time deleting them.
There seems to be no way to say, "I've been telling you that this is a photo of my dad, and so is that, and so is that, and that one too... you've had lots of 'training' in what my dad (and other family members) looks like: now instead of suggesting that this random person or some part of a brick wall that you think looks like a face is my dad, maybe re-run your analysis of who is who and try to identify him a little better".
The Library>Find Faces Again option is essentially the nuclear option (possibly why it is a little hidden up in the menus) - zap it all and re-run detection.
If I skip photos that include manually confirmed faces and in a given photo there are two manually confirmed faces and three that are not confirmed yet it will skip that photo and not try to re-identify those three. If I don't tick to skip any with manually confirmed faces then it zaps the faces that I had identified and finds a whole load that I'd deleted as not relevant.
I simply want it to look again at the "faces I've not yet confirmed" and have another stab at identifying who they might be now that I've told it the identity of hundreds of other faces.
I don't think there is an answer. Maybe it's one for me to bung in the suggestions!