I may have pushed Lightroom CC to, and past its limit, at least with regard to the People feature.
I have 147K photos synced from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom CC as smart previews. Lightroom CC identified 24K or so people. I forgot where I saw this count, maybe in the iOS version of the app, as I cannot easily find it in the Lightroom CC Desktop.
I started merging and naming the faces even as more photos were being synced. Everything was going well until
1) It got very slow after about 80K photos, and still is;
2) I went through an exercise of merging and naming a person, which added up to about 1000 photos, which would have made her the sixths most photographed person in my library. Instead, she disappeared from the People view completely.
Short version of the question: did I hit a limit, whether hidden or stated, of how many named people will show up? I have 242 named people as of now; at the time of the disappearance, I had about 240. I unnamed four and added six more to test this theory. All newly named people showed up as expected with 50-150 photo count.
Can it be a bug and how can it be proven/troubleshooted/fixed? I would love to hear an official response from the Adobe team rather than or in addition to community speculation. The person in question happens to be tennis start Maria Sharapova. If it had been anyone else, I might have a)not noticed, or b)let it go.
For a long version, read on. I did not want the question to be lost in my TL;DR post.
First of all, to rule out something that someone is likely to suggest, no, she did not inadvertently end up among hidden people.
Nor did she become un-named. Her 1000 or so photos are not found (in People view) either among the named, or among the unnamed, and neither sorted by count, nor by name,
Also, the photos that she was recognized in did not inadvertently become deleted. They can still be seen in the All Photos view AND, to add to the mystery, they are still tagged to her!
Should be visible, but is missing here (in Name order):
Also, if I start typing a name "WTA..." all known names come up in the dropdown, but not hers. This is consistent with the second screenshot above, but not the first. Either she exists as a person or she does not. The first screenshot says she does, the second -- not. Sounds like a corrupt index, but how to fix it?
Some other background info to help Adobe think about this, if they are reading.
I first found Sharapova among the unnamed people with 700 or so photos. I clicked on the face to merge and name. Right away, it started coming up with merge suggestions: is this her? Yes. Is this also her? Yes. Is this also her? Yes. About five or six good matches and one false one. By the time I accepted the merges, it should have added up to about 1000 photos and she should have jumped to the sixths spot among named people ordered by count. Time passed, as it aways does after I make any change in the People view, about 20 seconds, this probably has to do with the number of photos and/or faces in my library, very inconvenient, but "normal" for now. She eventually jumped, but she landed at the top with the same 700 photos she originally had. The merge was not reflected. "Something" went wrong, but it did not bother me too much at the time.
I clicked on her, now named, again. Again, the program listed the same matches I had seen and accepted previously. Again I accepted. I also picked a different photo to use as cover photo, and did this repeatedly, because for some of the photos I wanted to use, the face did not show up in the icon circle, but a random part of the photo instead (another bug, Adobe!). When I finally clicked the < to get out of the detail view and back to the People view, she disappeared and has been missing ever since. I restarted the program a couple of times.
One more thing. I wanted to see what the People view would look like on my iPhone. I don't think People view is available in the web version, the implementation of face recognition is different in Classic, and I don't own an iPad that will run Lightroom, so my only option was iPhone.
At first, I saw the old state of the library before I had done all the syncing and tagging between Classic and CC.
Then, the new counts and names started showing up: kid #1 with 26K photos, kid #2 with 16K photos, wife, self, parents, no Sharapova. THEN the named faces with highest counts started DROPPING OFF into the unnamed section. First kid #1, then kid #2, etc. The counts and face icons were there, but the names started disappearing. That's when I seriously freaked out and closed the app. I was wondering if the damage was already done, but when I checked Lightroom CC on the computer, everything was as before, with Sharapova still missing. I have no idea what will happen when (or if!) I open the iPhone app again and it has a chance to sync up.
Is there a better way/place to report such issues to Adobe?
I would them to be addressed by the engineers, but also for my missing person to be found.
Thanks!
10
Replies
AdChoices