is face recognition heuristic ?

[david6C19]

as i confirm faces, does the recognition in cloud improve?  does it learn from all the various faces and positions that i confirm to be a certain person, and apply it to future uploads?

now really getting into the hard work here, managing for half a dozen families of my own.

[Jim Wilde]

I found it quite effective at identifying faces for the same person that are spread across several decades. It tends not to happen automatically, but what typically happens when you start tagging a face is that it will then suggest another group of images from several years younger (or older) which may be the same person and ask you to confirm. If you say yes, you might then get another group from even earlier (or later) which it thinks might be the same person as per the last batch that you confirmed, and so on. In remarkably short order I was able to tag images of the same person which covered a 70 year time span. It's not perfect, of course, but I still found it quite effective (probably more so than the face recognition engine in Lightroom Classic).

[david6C19]

light room classic in mac, i believe, doesn't have facial recog.  this is why i had to deal with lightroom cc.  i would prefer to do all the work directly on my ssd with the photos, and acdsee does, to an extent, on a windows pc, but their mac version doesnt have faces either.  wont even start with iphotos, its a long running beef, a huge one, with mac users, including myself.  but, yeah, i agree, in the years i've been trying things out, this lightroom in the cloud has the best facial recog since picasa went belly up.

[Jim Wilde]

I don't know where you got that understanding that Classic doesn't have face recognition, but that's not correct.....it's had face recognition (both Windows and Mac versions) since before Lightroom was released in 2017. In some ways, the implementation in Classic is better than in Lightroom as it has much more user flexibility (in particular, the ability to manually draw and tag face regions which the recognition engine misses, and which Lightroom doesn't have), although the actual recognition engine is better, in my opinion, in Lightroom.

[david6C19]

wow.  you're right.  i went and spent some time in classic, after reading your reply.  figured it out, but i had assumed it would have the 'people' listing somewhere, to work like it does in lightroom cloud.  thus far, haven't seen it.  but i did test it, with a sample of photos, and seems that when going to a different photo, it shows suggestions for previously recognized faces.  wonder how powerful it would be to do all the work in classic on my m1 macbook air, as compared to working in the cloud, which has been amazing.  i know the cloud will be more powerful, using all the processing power that's available from adobe, than using my single cpu here.  the only caveat is, i have to spend time uploading my photos to the cloud and then working from there, rather than working directly from my fast ssd here at home.

i wonder, is there a way to transfer face recognition data that has been done by the cloud down to lightroom classic?  or do i need to do all the work from scratch, once again?

[Jim Wilde]

In Classic, there's a "People" icon on the toolbar in the Library module (press "T" to show the toolbar if it's not visible), or shortcut to "People" mode is to type "O" (again, while in the Library module).

Sadly, no you cannot transfer face recognition data between Classic and Lightroom in either direction.