P: Allow facial recognition feature to re-index a folder/collection

Report · Apr 26, 2015

Currently it is not possible to invoke a re-indexing of facial recognition data at either the global or folder/collection level. For my purposes re-indexing at the folder and collection level would be sufficient.

Reason: when a face is removed from a previously indexed image it is not possible to automatically recognize faces other than reviewing many images and manually applying a face region.

See this forum discussion: https://forums.adobe.com/message/7472...

Report · Nov 14, 2015

I'm amazed out how many legs (in jeans no less!) as well as hands, chests, and walls it "detects". Not sure they are quite ready for prime time.

Report · Nov 14, 2015

Sadly facial recognition works better in facebook than in lightroom.

Report · Dec 01, 2015

Agree completely, I've been using Picasa for years and finally moved to Lightroom when I heard this feature was enabled. I have around 10k photos and I am having to go through them almost one by one.

Picasa nailed this years ago, and in local client processing rather than being web-enabled like facebook - what is wrong with Adobe?!

Report · Dec 02, 2015

In the meanwhile this thread has been running 7 (!) months and there is neither a fix nor any comment or hope from Adobe. One of the major features for an upgrade from LR5 to LR6 is simply useless. For me LR6 feels like a bluff package and I'm very sad about Adobe's behaviour.

Report · Dec 02, 2015

In the meanwhile this thread has been running 7 (!) months and there is neither a fix nor any comment or hope from Adobe. One of the major features for an upgrade from LR5 to LR6 is simply useless. For me LR6 feels like a bluff package and I'm very sad about Adobe's behaviour.

Report · Dec 17, 2015

Come on Adobe; you are better than this!

Report · Dec 19, 2015

I fully agree. Lightroom needs two updates asap:
1) ability to rescan all photos for faces
2) ability to set granularity to the facial recognition function. There are currently approx 30-50% faces being missed in my photos. I am willing to manually deselect what is not a face rather than to have to go through all the photos to make sure there isnt a face missed

Additionally, I would welcome better selection management based on facial recognition. I currently cannot select 6 people and see only photo where they are all together.

Report · Dec 20, 2015

When I accidently deleted some face regions it's imposible to run process on selected photos again.

Report · Dec 20, 2015

In a comment above, Tomáš Houška wrote, "Additionally, I would welcome better selection management based on facial recognition. I currently cannot select 6 people and see only photo where they are all together."

You can do that with the Library Filter bar. Open the Metadata browser and add six Keyword columns:

Then select the 6 keywords, one keyword per column.

Report · Dec 26, 2015

Just signed up to a years subscription to LR and PS after previously managing 100k photo collection in Picassa. i believed i was joining the leadIng edge company in the photo management field - but my experience so far with the face recognition function has been far from satisfactory. Three days of lagging computer and ridiculous matches! How can Adobe be so far behind a free resource like Picassa in this (admittedly) small, but important area of the process.

from researching the net i have found that my experience is pretty typical and this has brought me to this site and this thread. To make it worse it would seem that no one at Adobe can even be bothered to address the issue here after 9 months of complaints!

Report · Dec 26, 2015

Yes, I feel kind of ripped off by Adobe, as the only reason I upgraded to LR6 was to finally have face recognition after all these years of waiting. To be honest, the implementation is a joke, and like you I find it amazing that a big player such as Adobe even bothers to roll out a half-baked product like this when Picassa have nailed it years ago.

Report · Dec 28, 2015

There were some under the hood face indexing performance improvements made in Lr CC 2015.2/6.2, especially on large Lightroom catalogs. The team did not advertise it much because of other Lr CC 2015.2/6.2 issues (which got resolved in Lr CC 2015.3/6.3).

Indexing 100K photos is some serious work. Lightroom has always try to tread a fine line between allowing you to continue to work in Lightroom while indexing is running in the background vs getting indexing work done in the shortest amount of time.

Report · Dec 28, 2015

Simon, It is good that some work is being/has been done on performance. However what those of us who have posted here are actually looking for is the ability to re-index images (which isn't possible at all) and be able to get LR to look for faces it has missed (without deleting those it has found).

Can you give us some indication of whether that issue is being looked at?

Thanks
Ian.

Report · Dec 28, 2015

Simon, I think we, the community, are looking for BETTER indexing and we are hoping that reindexing is a potential solution.

When I take multiple group photos with 10 people in them and it points to the background as faces, on a green screen no less, then something is seriously wrong with the algorithm. It figured out half the faces in some pictures, 2 in another, and 8 in yet another. There were no significant differences in the images except for people smiling/blinking/etc. which was the point of taking multiple shots. I uploaded the same photo to Facebook or and Picassa and those programs had no problem finding faces. Apple has also been doing this perfectly fine on Macs for years.

To make matters worse, I suspect more professionals use Lightroom for the bulk of their process and are looking for face recognition to help index photos for their clients.

Report · Dec 28, 2015

Not sure what you guys are even talking about. Just allow to re-do face recognition on all photographs. Nothing more. And the whole issue was caused by LR6 itself, when faces recognized in the past "disappeared" AND where blocked making the whole functionality utterly useless.

Report · Dec 28, 2015

And regarding performance. Give us a little control over it for ourselves. I'm perfectly happy letting the indexing run "full speed" when I'm not otherwise using the computer and if it actually works.

Report · Dec 28, 2015

The feature request to be able to re-index is on the backlog. When re-indexing, Lightroom would need to consider what to do with the existing faces and the faces found by the re-indexing. Different customers would want different options on how to combine the two.

As far as the indexing engine is concerned, we're always looking for improvement but it takes time. Adobe don't have much choice in terms of third party face SDKs that runs on Windows and Mac, and that is performant.

Report · Dec 28, 2015

At least can "reopen" all the faces where "no face" has been allocated (or it went lost as in the thousands in my case). That should not be a big deal. Keep the "indexed" faces and reopen all the rest.

Report · May 13, 2016

Same for me. I need this function !!

Report · May 24, 2016

Hello, it would be really helpfull to have this fonction allowed !

Report · Jun 23, 2016

If you flip your images horizontally, you can get LR to start indexing again, and it does find some missing images. When it has finished just flip them all back again. The faces flip back as well.

But to re-index a folder from scratch again, perhaps because like me you have accidentally deleted some faces, is more complicated. It can be done as I've just done it on a folder of 6000 images, part of a 100K catalog.

Step 1 is to backup the catalog, twice if you are of a nervous disposition!

Step 2 is to select the images in the folder you want to re-index from scratch, and export them to a new catalog (without originals or previews - you just want the data in the catalog)

Step 3 is to download a browser that allows you to look at and edit tables in the catalog. I use DB browser for SQLite < https://github.com/sqlitebrowser/sqlitebrowser/releases>

Step 4 is to open the new catalog containing the images to be re-indexed with the browser (NOT with LR ).

Step 5 is to find the tables in the browser that pertain to face recognition. I found four containing face info

Adobe_libraryImageFaceProcessHistory

AgLibraryFace

AgLibraryFaceCluster

AgLibraryFaceData

Step 6 is to delete all the lines of info in these tables. Just select all the lines in a table in the usual way and then click on delete at top right. Repeat with the other face tables

Step 7 is to save the edited catalog without the face info, and exit the browser.

Step 8 is to open LR with your main catalog, and remove the contents of the folder you are about to reimage. Remove the files from the catalog, NOT from the disk. This process can take some time. I watched it using the Performance monitor in win10, because although deleting the images from the catalog is more or less instant, deleting the previews is a more lengthy affair which seems to occur when LR feels like it.

Step 9 is to import the images from the edited catalog without face info back into your main catalog, where they will replace the ones you have just removed that had face info.

Step 10 is to tell LR to make new previews for these imported images (all your editing data is still there - you have not lost it), and then to start face recognition on this folder.

I have just done this and all my faces of named and unnamed people are now back; the main catalog passes the LR integrity test and I'm now back where I was yesterday before I accidentally removed all those faces.

It would of course be easier if Adobe coded this for us!

Bob Frost

Report · Jun 28, 2016

This is an important feature that needs to be implemented.

Report · Jun 28, 2016

I appreciate all the effort the above response entailed but....This is a conceptually simple process: Select files that need the facial recognition reset, then reset, then do a new scan. The above description of 10 steps and accessing tables and such is way too complicated. This complication should not be visible to the user.

When facial recognition was introduced, I processed my catalog (130,000) files. At that point, facial recognition was so bad, most of the results were junk. Since then facial recognition for new photos seems a lot better. I need help resetting or re-indexing without needing to know where LR stores tables and stuff and following 10 steps.

Report · Aug 22, 2016

I recently imported my 80,000 photo library. Things were progressing well until I discovered whole folders and many images (5000) were "unable to be found". Doing a search for missing images and manually reconnecting each folder, fixed many issues, but now none of these 5000 photos have any facial recognition and there's no way to initiate it. They were skipped (because they were missing, even though the paths were correct), so that's it. No 2nd chances! This is madness.

Report · Aug 22, 2016

Recently I tried the trick to
(1) "select all the images"
(2) "flip them horizontally"
(3) "run the face recognition
(4) flip back (the recognized faces stick)
Like this was able to find by the thousands, but still not sure got all of them...

P: Allow facial recognition feature to re-index a folder/collection

1 Correct answer