Lightroom 6 / CC2015 - Facial Recognition Terribly Slow, not using all of CPU or GPU, still keeps going when paused.

[crsouser]

This is actually a couple of issue but wondering if others are experiencing it and worked through it.

I am using a Dual Xeon CPU 3.2 ghz Mac Pro, Catalog on SSD, Images files on Mirrored Pair, Dedicated GPU (max I can install in my version of Mac Pro) and hardware acceleration enabled in Lightroom.

I watched the Lightroom 6 Facial Recognition tutorial which leaves out a lot of the bulk editing and says basically let it loose on your whole catalog.. NOT recommended.

I started out with a couple small portrait galleries that identified a couple hundred total people to seed facial recognition so it didn't suggest everyone is the first person I confirmed (which it will do otherwise). I have also optimized my catalog multiple times.

I have encountered the following serious performance issues and bugs with Facial Recognition.:

• Lightroom Facial Recognition goes to a ridiculous crawl after about 2000 images to be confirmed. (i.e. 2000-2300 in a couple hours, 800-1200 in the next 12 hours)
• Lightroom becomes largely unresponsive after having a fair number of images to be confirmed, even after pausing Address and Facial Recognition. So even selecting 4 rows of images can take 5 minutes with several long pauses.
• Once I select and click confirm it takes up to 2 minutes to update the "to be confirmed" list again.
• When I click on an individual at the top of the page, pause facial recognition and address lookup it still continues to "Look for similar faces" [BUG!!!!!!!!] even though all I want to do is just confirm some individuals more quickly in bulk with the images already identified.. not continue to look for more as a work around for the painfully slow responsiveness of the module.

The odd part is that with all of the performance issues Lightroom will not use more than 20-30% of my two Xeon CPUs, barely touches my GPU (<10% CPU, 30% memory), my and no more than 35% of my memory. Computer Temps are also barely above startup temperatures and 15-25 degrees cooler than when I run other applications which will consume my entire CPU and memory if I let it. I have explored Lightroom's settings but seen nothing further I can configure to speed it all up.  I have also attempted the operation on images on the SSD, my drobo (known to be slow), an independent fast disk I have, and a pair of raided disks and have the same issues.

I will also note that all of my other applications seem to continue to operate just fine.. the slowness seems to be contained to the Lightroom application itself.

Lightroom version: 6.0 [1014445]

Operating system: Mac OS 10 Version: 10.10 [3]

Application architecture: x64

Logical processor count: 8

Processor speed: 3.2 GHz

Built-in memory: 18,432.0 MB

Real memory available to Lightroom: 18,432.0 MB

Real memory used by Lightroom: 5,537.5 MB (30.0%)

Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 32,240.6 MB

Memory cache size: 4,342.0 MB

Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 8

Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2

Displays: 1) 2048x1152

Graphics Processor Info:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 OpenGL Engine

Check OpenGL support: Passed

Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation

Version: 3.3 NVIDIA-10.0.31 310.90.10.05b12

Renderer: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 OpenGL Engine

LanguageVersion: 3.30

Application folder: /Applications/Adobe Lightroom

Library Path: /Users/DryClean/Documents/Lightroom_Catalog/MyCat_LR6.lrcat

Settings Folder: /Users/DryClean/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom

Anyone have any suggestions?

[ReLe]

I have excatly the same experiences here.

1. Tagging is very slow. I type a name and it takes 5-7 seconds to register.

2. When under one person and confirmed photos, if I change name of wrongly tagged photo. About 70% of the time it just says "added to xxxnn", but does not change the tag. I have to edit keyword tag manually

3. When under one person I confirm photos, they are added to confirmed. My view scrolls up a lot and I have to painfully slowly to scroll back where I was before confiming. It would be great if I could just view the similar faces view and work on that without the view switching to confirmed photos all the time.

4. Scrolling is VERY VERY slow.

[edgduke]

how in the world was this version released?

it's like a massive oxymoron -- "from the same company that brought you photoshop and lightroom, now a virtually unusable and freshman beta of face recognition" --

-- baffling.

[genefama]

‌It's like something from the 1990s.

[hupak]

It is the same with my machine here: MacBook Pro with 8 GB RAM. There is no difference if the pics are on the local SSD or the external USB 3.0 hard drive. The interface is terribly slow. For my 60.000 pics it is not usable at all. Picasa worked like a charm on the same folders. At the moment the long hoped feature is of no use in LR6.

[davidh93831741]

‌I've been using Face recogition in Google Picassa for years. It's 10x better/faster - and free! I can't believe that Adobe after all this time, still can't figure out how to implement a now mature technology that's been around for years. I've been hanging out to have this feature integrated into LR, but sadly disappointed.

[Tanja2014]

i have the same issues plus these two:

BUG: Face Recognition splatters Face Tag rectangles all over my Images

LIGHTROOM 6 Facial recognition runs amok

LIGHTROOM: facial recognition data not saved - potential data loss

and as i wrote in another post.. i agree adobe should get help from google to get face recognition right.

[ricardol49133120]

for sure it is slow. even aperture, which had not been updated for years, would do this way faster.

[edgduke]

actually, alksaki, it pauses the name-guessing, but still plows through the faces, from what i've found, and just gives you a laundry list of "?" faces.

i'm FINALLY at 25% to go on 218K photos -- i feel like i'm reaching nirvana or something.

this is after 2 weeks of continuous process and fighting with my wife, because she thinks i spend too much time with "faces" on the computer -- which i do.

but you know, if you don't, then you just have a boatload of "?" because subsequent scans can't be matched.

pathetic -- me and LR6.

[alksaki2]

edgduke, thanks for the reply.  Adding names to faces in the past was something I often forgot to do.  Now, we have a way to find those faces.  Right now they are a boatload of ?'s. LOL.  My wife thinks I spend too much time in front of the computer, too.  She will be pleasantly surprised when I can quickly find images of the kids and grandkids.

I was looking for a way to improve performance when working on images.  When the Face Detection under the Identity Plate is paused, the CPU core usage drops to a much lower level.  So, I think Face Recognition stops looking at ALL the images that have been imported over time.  The 'pausing" let LR6 work a little faster. 

In the paused state, the People icon below the grid activates "Detecting Faces in Filmstrip".  The People grid appears and populates with faces from the selected folder.  The CPU usage goes way up.  After editing names and deleting unwanted "face areas", the CPU usage goes way down.

It seems that the computer must stay running while scanning all the images to the very end.  I was about halfway through 254K images and shutdown.  On the next opening of LR, it started scanning all 254K again. Yikes!

[barnao]

Same here 360k catalog, been running for about 70% of the time for 1.5 weeks...139k to go

SSD Catalog, RAID 0 (3 x 4tb/7200RPM)

Lightroom version: CC 2015.0.1 [ 1018573 ]

License: Creative Cloud

Operating system: Windows 8.1 Business Edition

Version: 6.3 [9600]

Application architecture: x64

System architecture: x64

Logical processor count: 12

Processor speed: 3.3 GHz (OC 4.0Ghz)

Built-in memory: 16279.2 MB

Real memory available to Lightroom: 16279.2 MB

Real memory used by Lightroom: 4177.4 MB (25.6%)

Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 4366.8 MB

Memory cache size: 3050.9 MB

Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 6

Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2,AVX,AVX2

System DPI setting: 120 DPI

Desktop composition enabled: Yes

Displays: 1) 2560x1600, 2) 3840x2160

Input types: Multitouch: No, Integrated touch: No, Integrated pen: No, External touch: No, External pen: No, Keyboard: No

Graphics Processor Info:

GeForce GTX 780/PCIe/SSE2

Check OpenGL support: Passed

Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation

Version: 3.3.0 NVIDIA 347.52

Renderer: GeForce GTX 780/PCIe/SSE2

LanguageVersion: 3.30 NVIDIA via Cg compiler

Adapter #1: Vendor : 10de

  Device : 1004

  Subsystem : 36041458

  Revision : a1

  Video Memory : 2962

Adapter #2: Vendor : 1414

  Device : 8c

  Subsystem : 0

  Revision : 0

  Video Memory : 0

AudioDeviceIOBlockSize: 1024

AudioDeviceName: Speakers (Realtek High Definition Audio)

AudioDeviceNumberOfChannels: 2

AudioDeviceSampleRate: 44100

Build: Uninitialized

Direct2DEnabled: false

GPUDevice: not available

OGLEnabled: true

[genefama]

‌A big problem continues to be that once you wait for it to index all your faces you find it missed over half of them. There are many cases where it missed the subject of the photo but managed to find a tiny waiter off in the shadows. I don't know how this will ever get fixed; it seems it'll require an update that lets you rerun the indexing a few times, maybe with different levels of granularity. I doubt that's coming.

It stands to reason that a system that hands you thousands of false positives for every face can't recognize if something is or isn't a face in over half the cases. Faces in profile or tilted down, especially with the eyes looking down, are bypassed completely. I have directories with a thousand people shots in them, many with multiple people, and instead of LR6 returning an index of 1.5k or so, it gives me 385. I'm not sure how valuable the search advantages will be in this case; I can see it not returning some favorite shots of people.

Anyway, for anyone looking to get past the spinning wheels, work on one directory at a time. Then once a directory is done, keep it selected so you have the same thumbnails of identified faces in the confirmed area, and control-select the next directory. You won't have to reseed the confirmed faces area this way and things move much faster when you're not working with the entire library. It also helps to click each person in the confirmed faces and work in that view sometimes. It'll return faces of family members of that person and you can rename those. You can watch it focus its top results as you confirm but, annoyingly, it doesn't narrow the total suggestions but actually expands them the more faces you confirm and the fewer correct positives remain. (This seems opposite to how it should work. It should give you fewer faces the more you confirm as it gets a better idea what the person looks like and has fewer shots left unconfirmed of that person.)  Yet, even with the expanded results, faces will still escape it and pop up in other people's results as false positives.

Bottom line: It's only a little better than manual tagging, and not as thorough because of the poor hit rate of the initial indexing. But it works better if you stick to isolated directories and occasionally individual people. At least that way you don't have to wait for it to re-sort tens of thousands of results with every click.

[djmcm]

Same Problem here!

ADOBE, WHAT IS THE SOLUTION?

[2birds44]

Is it possible to permanently turn off the face recognition feature until Adobe corrects the problem?

[Pixellated]

Same here., although I am using a PC running Windows 8.1.

Locating the faces took three days, and recognition is dreadful; far less accurate than Google Picasa!

Worst of all, since I turned on face recognition and pointed it at my whole catalogue, the Catalogue now takes an absolute age to start up, whereas before it was pretty instant.

Unless Adobe come out with a fix in the next few weeks, I shall probably write off the time spent setting up face recognition and revert to an earlier version of my catalogue.

Very poor implementation, because not only does it not work very well, it makes the entire application less productive.

[Klozaw]

I'll add my machine to the problem:

Windows 7

intel i5 processor

16 GB RAM

Forever to respond when tagging when anything more than a few dozen faces are in the group.

Also, it seems to randomly highlight people after the name assignment is done. The result is that  sometimes random people are assigned random names making the it even harder for the face recognition to work properly. Its confused.

NEW FEATURE REQUEST: The ability to use the paint tool to tag people.

[mwillems]

Same. It has taken me the several weeks since release to index my faces. When I now look and I want to name some of the question marks, after everything I do (I name a face, or I confirm a guessed name) I get to wait 30-60 seconds until I can do anything else. Spinning beach ball meanwhile.

Groan: I do hope updates, and speedy updates, fix this. I do this for a living and while hobbyists with 1000 photos will not notice this speed loss, I certainly do and it's hard top swallow.

[ptr727_1]

Same performance problem, the feature is next to useless.

It took 3 days to identify faces, now I'm trying to catalog them, getting ready to tear my hair out.

Click, wait wait wait, click, wait wait wait, drag, nothing nothing, try again.

The UI is so unresponsive that the feature is totally useless.

[mwillems]

Yeah. It's been what, three weeks? At this rate I will have named the faces in two months time, IF that. I keep hoping that when this is done, it will be usable from then on. Biut I don't see it.

And as a result, LR6 is much (much) slower for me than LR5 was, in spite of the supposed performance enhancements.

I'm sure there will be a fix. Right, Adobe? Please?

[Herinto]

This facial recognition feature has been a disaster for me.  Replaced a perfectly good MacPro with a newMacPro and 1 tb SSD for catalog and photos.  Still horribly slow.

Hope that Adobe fixes this quickly.  What a mess.

[knipsefritze]

I really doubt, that this fesature will ever be usable in real time! It reminds me of the brushes, that are still kind of sluggish at times, sometimes they are ok. That has been like that since LR 1 for me, switching to an iMac i7 with 12 GB of RAM didn't take care of the problem either.

My family photo library consists of 15000 images and for days the facial recognition progress bar hangs at around 1/3rd with my machine plowing on with an average 130% CPU load. And who programmed this feature? I have now verified ober 1000 photos of my daughter at all age levels and LR is still suggesting almost any face it can find in my photos as "is this your daughter"? I mean, how pathetic can you get having over 1000 pictures of my daughter to analyse the face and still not getting it right?

Adobe, I think it would be faster to manually go through all the 15000 pics and use the spray brush to tag the faces myself. Reminds me of the map disaster that Apple faced, when introducing it first. This feature is just not ready and in Alpha stage! But without it, LR6 would be missing a key feature to justify the upgrade price. I guess that is why they put it in anyway.

[davidh93831741]

knipsefritze I totally agree. The facial recognition is a joke and I'm surprised so many seem to be taking it so well. I only upgraded to LR5 a few months back, and later discovered LR6 with face recognition was about to be released. Adobe weren't prepared to offer me a complementary or reduced cost upgrade, so I bit the bullet and paid for another upgrade as I really wanted face recognition. Now I feel completely duped with this practically useless feature.

[genefama]

‌I'm amazed how few threads exist about how bad this feature is. I'm thinking of starting one about best practices because at this point I've become somewhat of an expert and have developed some workarounds.

But the fact remains that face recognition is the only new thing to justify renumbering the version and would be the only reason to buy an upgrade, if it worked. Since it doesn't, people are better off staying in LR 5.X.

[mwillems]

Yeah, the brushes too. I have an Intuos tablet and I need to move the pen REALLY slowly in order for the brush action to follow me. I mean REALLY slowly. Speed increase? It's slower than ever. And I do this for a living, so it is of more than passing interest.

[knipsefritze]

I let my machine run over night and it is crunching numbers for Lightroom's face detection now for 15 hours straight. Still about 20% left to go as far as the progress bar is concerned. So I guess for 15000 photos, LR needs about close to 20 hours to go through them all. That calculates to roughly 5 seconds per image! So that is a rough number to calculate the time needed to get the face detection done. LR is unusable while that is running.

LR is running over 50 threads on my machine, uses 130-200 % proceessing power at a constant rate, leaving two cores at idle, is sluggish as can be and shows the beach ball for almost 5 seconds after every click I try to do. Very, very frustrating for a pro App! I am not a programmer, but I thought multiple cores and multithreading would let a machine do multiple tasks at once without completely blocking the program?

[RyanMatthewBarrett]

53k

liquid cooled Fx-8350, 16gb ram. Library is on an average SSD, but images on quite an old drive.

The thing is, its not like it is even thrashing the CPUs or HD.  Its just plain slow. Like it is crippled.

And I had one crash after finding about 600 faces in an unknown number of photos that even managed to unmount the drive where the library resided.

Other than that, it does stay usable during, which is a plus. Definitely designed with some multi-tasking in mind, compared to the performance of previous versions.  I just wish it were a bit more dynamic in its allocation of resources.

Edit:

Definitely using all 8 cores.  LR is only using between 18 and 24 % of the CPU, and only 1.9gb of RAM, at the moment, while detecting.