Face Recognition - flag photos to be skipped entirely

[pbutche]

I'm trying to find better ways to manage a massive collection of photos in which I want to Face Recognize ("FR") a large number of people.  However, we're talking about several hundred thousand images. There are entire collections that I want the FR to ignore the entire photo (parades, performances, amusement parks, etc.).  Such photos are scanning and finding so many false-positives that I'm finding it frustrating. 

I would rather flag all photos from the asmusement park 'collection' to be skipped for the FR tool entirely. Then I would manually add as desired. 

My research only seems to allow for pausing the FR engine as a whole, and enabling as a whole. 

In light of that, there are several people I would like to permanently ignore. I couldn't figure out how to do that. So instead, I caved and manually created people called "JohnHSFriend" etc.  But I could imagine in the future that if I want to rescan for faces, I'd like to not get John's old High School friend again.  I'm hoping I"m just not using the right buzz words to find the solutions I'd like.  Thank you!

[gary_sc]

I also am unaware that it's possible to have FR on partially. I think it's similar to someone being only a little bit pregnant. It is an interesting idea though and I do think it could/should be considered. But, it's not here now.

Having ran my family's photo through FR plus an organization I belong to, I can say that in the beginning I found it comically bad in its success but as I progressed, it did get better and better. One of the pleasant surprises was when it was getting the recognition of family members at different ages, some of which had not been seen before — it does learn.

[pbutche]

I, too, have been impressed with the service. It does a good job considering.  I've read that it wasn't possible to select the faces that FR should "only" find.  considering the sheer volume, it's a ton of work to clear out the false positive hits.  I was wondering if there was another neat trick I might be able to employ.

I guess I just work the work until it is done! lol.  There are entire swaths of photos that contain zero family/friends, but trigger dozens of false-pos hits (choirs, stages, etc.).  It would be a good enhancement request to allow only certain faces to be collected. 

Thank you for sharing. 

[johnrellis]

You could leave face recognition paused, and when you want to process a collection, a folder, or other batch of photos, select all the photos and do Library > Find Faces Again, with Skip Photos That Include Manually Confirmed Faces.

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[pbutche]

I think that is what I will do for the amusement park collections.  Thanks for this tip. 

[johnrellis]

"There are entire swaths of photos that contain zero family/friends, but trigger dozens of false-pos hits (choirs, stages, etc.).  ... it's a ton of work to clear out the false positive hits."

One way to speed that up: If you have lots of photos you're sure don't have faces you want to tag, add them to a temporary collection. Then select that collection and do View > People. Now select all the Unnamed People thumbnails and hit the Delete/Backspace key to delete in one go all those face rectangles from the photos.

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[pbutche]

That's a great tip.  The amusement park collections will be where I apply this work-around.  It seems like the Face Rec tool is so powerful and handy that you can't help but use it across entire swaths of collections.  But there are SOO many faces I want to ignore.  lol. I hope they develop a "person album" in which I want to find only those people and quasi ignore the others.  Then I can go through the other people and find individuals if I wish.  Until then, creative work arounds are awesome. Thanks!