I have Lightroom 3 (for about a year) and just recently downloaded the Lightroom 4 beta. All excited to try Lr4, I was floored that there is no facial recognition. Floored. This is Adobe, right? In my mind, this is a no-brainer to have in the Lr suite.
I just recently digitized (scanned) photos of my extended family (pre-digital) - I have thousands and thousands of photos to attempt to catalogue, and then eventually post-process. Facial recognition would certainly simplify, and shorten the time involved - as none of these photos have any metadata.
Picasa and Aperture both have facial recogntion. I've not tried the Aperture - but was impressed how well Picasa was able to match faces - independent of the age of the person. I was impressed that it seemed to employ a learning algorithm - so it got smarter at making the right tag as it was told right or wrong. I think I will give Aperture a try too.
When it comes time with the Lr4 beta expires, and I have to ante up an upgrade fee, I am seriously considering moving to a different post-processing platform to one which includes facial recognition.
I very much hope and vote for Lr 4 to have this functionality.. Thanks 🙂
EXACTLY!! Face-finding is very useful for image development shortcutting such as "quick face zooms" and to judge images based on people blinking or smiling or whatever. As a professional, I don't give a rip about who the hell the person actually is. I mean, it might be useful if LR could identify them as "Nameless ID 123" so that it could show me all of the images in this folder with that face, but it doesn't have to be "Jenny"
Ditto. I recently spent more than 60 hours manually entering tagging data for all the people in my 60,000+ LR3 photo library. Most of these photos were scans from slides and old negatives. Facial recognition would have been a godsend to me. (I only found the Picasa trick after I had completed doing this manually.)
I recently purchased a Mac just so I could experiment with Aperture and I-photo just for the facial recognition tools.
I'd find it terribly convenient if LR would find faces in my images, perhaps while doing a 1:1 prerender, and show the faces on my 2nd monitor. While I cruise through the photos in the Library module, I can then use my main screen (30" FTW) to judge composition and lighting and look over to my 2nd screen to see face sharpness and expression. Man, that would be fantastic!
I am personally still having the problem of seeing how Facial Recognition is going to benefit my processing and workflow on a shoot-to-shoot basis and I mostly shoot people.
I tag my photos with the individuals included at the time of import and the system works well for me and probably others.
I WOULD NOT want facial recognition to be part of standard and mandatory processing. That is as some have suggested as building it into 1:1 preview or import functions. I DO NOT want it part of it as the last thing I want is to have to add another step to my processing of going back and correcting facial recognition or having a series of pop-ups going "Who is this person?"
I personally only see the point of facial recognition for those types that haven't managed their catalog or for those using Lightroom for personal use that want to point it at their catalog and say go find me all of the photos of 'grandma'.
I personally think it should be a feature that should wait until it is developed into a broader "object" recognition feature vs. something that is only useful for identifying people so it could be of use to those hoping for broader function and identification and could identify multiple things in photos that does take time to go through as you shoot.
There are usually so few people in images most people, I just don't see the value for Adobe concentrating their resources on developing "Facial Recognition" in LR4 when I think there would be broader appeal features that people would use under the currently implied timelines for LR4.
Exactly, the first step should be having LR understand that there *is a face in the image*. What can you do with that? When you hit Z, LR will zoom in on that face, not the center of the photo. Implication? Faster analysis of the quality of the most important part of the image: the face. Faster? Yeah, you aren't constantly zooming in and out.
If LR can identify that 4 faces in the image (READ: NOT IDENTIFY WHO THEY ARE), then LR can give you a 4-up on your 2nd monitor at 1:1 zoom so you can see face details and judge sharpness very quickly while your primary monitor is zoomed out for color/composition judging. These little things will speed up the pruning/filtering process in the Library module.
Then, only then, should LR *maybe* refine the face algorithm to uniquely identify the person. But even then, really, how much time would we be saving when we can blanket tag all of the photos in a shoot's folder in 3 seconds already: CTRL+A, type tag, ENTER
Note that Picasa 3.9 is now embedding the face information into the xmp, using the standard developped by the Metadata Working Group, of which Adobe and Microsoft are members.
Seems that those defining standards are not able to follw them (microsft photo gallery saves the face information using its own implementation, adobe photoshop element store the faces in a database only)
I love adobe products so I hope you will catch up
regards
Please add facial recognition to Lightroom. I am using Picasa for this now. It is much faster than manually tagging and surprisingly accurate.
Thank you.
Facial rec would be great to find all photos of person in a large catalog. But do not restrict it to people like all the rest of the services. I shoot dog shows too. NOBODY currently recognizes animal faces. Everyone has pets!
And while you're at it, pattern recognition would provide a way to arrange a catalog artistically. I sometimes need a photo for a layout that has a certain type of blue in it, for example. The picture finding function on Google is crude, but based sort of on what I'm thinking.
Whether or not a facial recognition feature would be useful obviously depends on the type of photography you do. I'm an amateur and the designated "family" photographer. I have thousands of pictures and even if not perfect it would be nice to be able to search them for a particular family member. I can't imagine going through them one by one and tagging them. On a recent vacation I took over 500 photos and I can't even imagine tagging them one by one.
Facial recognition is already in Photoshop Elements and I think it should be in any software that catalogs photos like LR4.
Guys, I noticed today that my Nikon D4 has face detection built in. When I scroll through the shots on my camera, I can rotate the front dial to move the zoom to each face. That is EXACTLY what I want in LR. I don't give a rip WHO the person is, I just want LR to be smart enough to find the "center of mass" of faces and zoom in there when I hit the space bar. In and out. Faces sharp? Yes/No Keep/Reject.
I would like to see a facial recognition app or software that would help me identify people in scanned photos. I am a researcher doing genealogy work and I come across photos of people at different ages and in groups and it can take weeks or never to identify everyone or even the key players. I would like to be able to compare two photos to see if they are the same person.
Great suggestion My photo collection is:
a) huge
b) not just about people
And I know that I am not alone!
My photo tagging skills are on the lazy side and I find that my old photos are almost lost to me because the pile is so huge. Even poorly implemented face recognition would be a huge help and I will take what I can get. I agree, pet recognition would be great
But what if I we could find objects as well? I don't know the technical difficulty of this but Lightroom's library function would blow everybody else out of the water if it could do any and all kinds of recognition. How about recognizing 1955 chevys, or the starship Enterprise, or Faberge' eggs? Please Adobe, don't just wait for Google to figure this out, or better yet, work with them.
Hey George Woodward Great suggestion re pet recognition.
One of the most important aspects of Lightroom to me is the cataloging features, and recognition of faces plus whatever would allow me to import collections of photos and then quickly sort and tag them based on a previously set up recognition search. That would be FANTASTIC!
My photo collection is:
a) huge
b) not just about people
And I know that I am not alone!
Light room's importing and tagging features are excellent, but I have to face it, my photo tagging skills are on the lazy side and I find that my taggless old photos are almost lost to me because the pile is so huge. Even poorly implemented face recognition would be a great help,
I will take whatever Adobe can give me. But I agree with George Woodwards earlier suggestion that, pet recognition would be also be helpful to a lot of people.
But what if I we could find objects as well? I don't know the technical difficulty of this but Lightroom's library function would blow everybody else out of the water if it could perform multiple kinds of recognition. Not only faces and pets, but how about recognizing 1955 chevys, or the starship Enterprise, or Faberge' eggs?
Please Adobe, don't just wait for Google to figure this out, or better yet, work with them.
Feature request: Would like to have the ability to add and edit Image Region Metadata, per the Metadata Working Group's Guidelines for Handling Image Metadata, Version 2.0, November 2010. Useful not only for face tagging, but feature tagging as well as comments, to do notes for developing or using, etc.
I've wrote a Lightroom plugin to import face tags from Picasa into keywords.
You can download it at http://code.google.com/p/lr-picasafac...
I still adding functionnality, but it works fine.
Note that it is important for the algorithm to be able to handle People with exact same name but who are not the same persons.
I have 2 friends with the exact same name and only picasa seem to handle it
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