Adobe Photoshop Elements Organizer face entries corrupted

soundpatrol said:

The corruptions are alos not conistent; selecting person x shows a number of curruptions but if you try that same person later on, there are a different set of corruptions.

This tells me that the catalog is not corrupted.  Instead, you seem to be having performance problems, probably related to auto-analysis.  So, I don't think we have discussed this before but have you turned off generation of Auto-creations?  This is a HUGE resource hog that interferes with all kinds of taks within Elements.  You can turn it off in Preferences.  But you can also turn it off temporarily in Task Manager by terminating the Elements Auto Creations 2020 process. 

I also have to ask again, how large is your catalog?  How many photos and how many videos?  Also, what are the specs of your computer and have you updated your graphics card recently?

I doubt whether Adobe support was going to make any major changes or delettions to your catalog.  But what exactly did you ask them to do?

soundpatrol said:

When using the Media pane I have a Tag pane down the right hand side of the screen. It has four sections; Keywords, People Tags, Places Tag and Event Tags.I have used these extensively and have used the People Tags to identify people in my photos, usually by dragging a particular People Tag onto the picture being displayed. I probably have about 60 people defined in these People Tags (they are sub categorised between Friends and Family.

This is what I suspected, and is why I believe your catalog is not corrupted.  When you drag and drop a People tag to your photos, no face recognition information is available for the tag.  That is why the generic icons show up in the People Room for Named people, as shown in your original screen shots.

So, if I understand you correctly I am using the People Tags rather than defining people (tags) in the Keywords tags, which is what you were suggesting is best practice, right?

Yes, that appears to be what you have been doing.   If you want to use face recognition, then you should continue to use the People tags (not the keyword tags).  As Michel has explained, he does not use People tags; he uses keyword tags to name people manually.  Either kind of tagging works the same, but it is best to use only one type of tag to avoid confusion.

One important point I haven't really mentioned is that face recognition is not perfect and you may have many photos with people in them who have not been identified by Elements' media analysis.  There are many reasons for this.  Earlier versions would only recognize well lit full-face images of people.  Elements 2020 recognizes a broader range of faces, even side profiles. However, for example, if I am taking a photo/video of one of my grandsons, from behind, playing the piano, no face will be recognized.  It is therefore necessary to tag the image manually.  If I do this, using a People tag, the image will show up in the Named People room with a generic icon.

So my next area of misundertsanding is what happens when you move your mouse over a face in a picture and APE puts a suare around it and asks you to name the poerson? Is this added to the People Tags.

Yes.  If you have People Recognition turned on in the View menu, and hover over a face in an image that has been face recognized, a circle will appear with the name of the person if that person has been named in the People room, or you will be offered a choice to name the person in a text box under the circle.  If the person has been previously named in another photo, you may even get an option to confirm the person's name with a click of a checkmark.  (Is this X?)

If you find a face that has not been recognized, you have the choice (only in full screen view of the image) to Mark [the] Face with a button in the lower tool panel.  If you click the button, a box will appear that you can move and stretch or shrink around the face. You are then given the option to name the person that you have marked.  Once you do this, the person's face thumbnail will appear in their stack in the Named People room, and they will also be marked with a People tag.

Once I have understood the above I will move on to the last piece of the puzzle, what does Auto Analysis do to my People Tags, does it add extra info to them or is it a separte thing?

The Auto Analysis creates a .json file for every file in your catalog.  As I understand it, the file contains the pixel coordinates of the face that has been found, adds the People tag information when the person has been named, and provides other database information to link the face to the file.

I hope I have answered all of your questions and that you are not on information overload. 

I'm still not convinced that your catalog is "corrupted." 

But to assist you moving forward, how many total media files do you have in your catalog? 

1. How do I move forward? I could continue to manually tag faces and I'm sure this would work fine however.....

When you ask about manual tagging of faces, do you mean tagging photos with keyword tags (with names of people) or tagging them with the system People tags?  My advice is that you should not use both as that can get very confusing.  I would use the People tags and, if you have both, you should convert all tags to People.  (Michel may disagree with me on this.)  To convert any keyword tags to People do the following:

1. Check the box for a name keyword tag.  This will filter all of the images to those containing the keyword tags.
2. Press Ctrl+A to select them all.
3. Either create a new People tag for that person or use that person's existing People tag and tag the media in the grid.
4. Delete the keyword tag of the person.
5. Wash, rinse and repeat for all other keyword tags for named persons.  It really doesn't take very long.

2. APE has moved a long way since Version 13 and the auto analysis feature does look great and would be useful to ferret through all my pics and identify lots more face of new and not so new faces.

I agree.  You should use auto-analysis moving forward. I have been using face recognition since it was first introduced.  In  earlier versions, I convinced myself that I could tag people faster by doing it manually.  However, because of the speed and accuracy of the current program, it would take me far longer to tag manually on a large group of photos e.g. when shooting a big family event.  A few months ago, I rebuilt my entire catalog of some 170,000 media files. Auto-analysis created more than 40,000 stacks of faces.  However, it did not take me very long to identify most files of my close family members which had stacks of files containing as many as a thousand images. 

I have about 10,000 video files in my catalog.  More than half of the total stacks were for the videos.  I believe this is because in a long video clip, the same person may be identified more than once because they are shot at different angles and in different light.  The face recognition algorithms are too sensitive, I believe.  So a lot of bystanders appear in the People stacks.  However I have developed some strategies to winow them out in large numbers, using the Don't Show Again control.

One last question. As things stand people are currently identified with my manual tags. If auto analysis is switched on does it build on these manual, replace them or are they two seperate things? Sorry if this is a dumb question.

There's no such thing as a dumb question.  😉

Essentially, they are separate tags.  I don't know whether the algorithms use manual tags to help auto-suggestion of names, but I think not.

To start the face recognition from scratch, go to Media Analysis in Preferences and choose Reset Face Analysis.  This will delete all of the .json files and start face recognition again.  You will lose ALL face recognition previously completed.

I may have read your original post too quickly.  I have occassionally seen the Is this X with no face to confirm.  But I think this may be a page refresh issue since you seem to say that if you hover in place, the face may appear.  There are definitely some minor page refresh issues with FR.  For example, once you add a name to a face in the UnNamed People room, it is replaced by the next thumbnail to the right.  However, the old thumbnail will remain for a split second and alternate with the new thumbnail.

Do you have any videos that are undergoing face recognition?  This can take a very long time to complete. Photos are completed before videos and the status bar in the lower right is not as consistently present as it is for photos.  So, I'm wondering whether this has contributued to your issue.

Also, if you have Auto-creations turned on, the analysis can be a real process hog.  This might also be contributing to the issue.

I think the situation you are running into is that the photos have not actually gone through the face recogntion anlaysis.  As we know from your other thread, you are converting from Elements 11 to 2020.  IIRC, and I may be wrong about this, but Elements 11 was the first version to use the People room.  However, when earlier catalogs with People keyword tags were converted, they were automatically tagged with the new kind of People tag.  So, we ended up with new People tags but only generic icons for their faces.  Over subsequent versions, I think this got cleaned up and ultimately all photos were analyzed and faces were available for recognition which would then have a thumbnail of the recognized face. 

So, I think you will have to wait for Elements 2020 to complete its Face Recognition and you will have to either confirm the faces in the Named People room, or add their names in the UnNamed People room.  You may end up with both a keyword tag and a People tag of the same person for the same photo.  Both will work to search for the person using the Tags panel checkboxes.  (But don't use both as the search will filter to a result that includes only both tags. )

MichelBParis may have some better recollection than I do about the conversion of tags in Elements 11, but I believe he continues to use keyword tags rather than Face Recognition People tags.