How to Rescan Faces Not Recognized in Older Versions of Organizer

[frankc36164235]

I am a long term user of Photoshop Elements with over 80,000 images in my catalog.   Facial recognition was enabled back around 2017.

PSE v2020 does a acceptable job of generating face thumbnails (both named and unnamed) from photos as they are imported.

However, there are many photos imported to my catalog by earlier versions of PSE where faces that should be recognizable have not been identified as faces.  In these cases I have to individually mark faces and name them which is very time consuming.  Is this a result of photos that were imported prior to facial recognition and never being analyzed?  Or perhaps they were analyzed by an earlier version of facial recogniton that did not identify a face so that photo has been marked internally as analyzed?

Bottom line, I would like to force PSE to rescan all my photos for additional faces as if they have been imported 

[Greg_S.]

There are many reasons why a face may not be recognized.  In my experience, each year the process gets better - but it is not perfect.  Face recognition has been around since very early versions, although it had a major uphaul around version 11.  To be honest, I don't know whether older images are rescanned for recognition to take advantage of newer and better algorithms.  That's a good question, and I'll see if I can find out the answer.  I believe that any face recognition that has already taken place will be preserved when an older catalog is converted to a newer version one.  Existing UnNamed People stacks will be transferred over to the new version for naming.

However, if you are really set on deleting all your face recognition information and starting fresh, you can do so by going to the Edit>Preferences>Media Analysis dialog and clicking on the Reset Face Analysis button.

I have never done this.  But I assume that all files that have People Name tags applied will continue to have that metadata.  The only problem will be that when you select the name in the People>Named tab, the faces will just have a generic icon until you associate the tagged name with a recognized face in an UnNamed People stack (or on the image itself in full screen view).

Rather than click the Reset button, you might want to try creating a new catalog and importing all of your files into it to see whether it looks like you will achieve the result you want after face recognition has been completed.  Make note of some folders in your current catalog where you think faces should have been found and then click on the folder in the People room to see whether the face has been recognized by your current verions of Elements.

[Edited]:  Actually, it would suffice just to import a few of the folders into the new catalog as a test of the potential result.

Please report back what you decide to do and what results you achieve.

[frankc36164235]

Thank you for your reply. 

Your suggestion about reimporting suspect folders into a new catalog is worthy of consideration.  Is there a simpler way to force rerunning of facial recognition?  I may first try renaming suspect folders in an effort to force renaming.  I'll report back with results of any testing.

On a more general note,  I feel that Adobe should do a better job of explaining the facial recognition workflow.  I am not looking for proprietary details of the facial recognition algorithm itself, but something equivilent to a flow chart showing the steps.

[frankc36164235]

Another question regarding your suggestions.  I've assumed that the "reset face analysis" process you suggested using will delete all people stacks - named and unnamed alike.  Is this correct?

[Greg_S.]

I've never done a reset so don't have any experience with it.  My guess is that the named People stacks will remain, but the faces will just show generic icons.  If you want, I will see if I can test that theory out and get back to you.

[frankc36164235]

I got sidetracked and just did a reset on a sample catalog.  All people tags (named and unnamed) were deleted. The facial recognition ran again after the catalog was closed and reopened.  No need for  you to test it out.  Thanks for your offer to help.

[Greg_S.]

Thanks for letting us know your results.

[frankc36164235]

So resetting my catalog is not an option because it will delete all the people tags (ie all non keyword tags).

Can you suggest another workaround to rescan facial recognition based on your (Adobe's) knowledge of the auto tagging process?

[Greg_S.]

Can you suggest another workaround to rescan facial recognition based on your (Adobe's) knowledge of the auto tagging process?

The only workaround I can think of would be to delete images from a catalog and reimport them. Again, I'm not sure if this will work, but you can give it a try.