Initiating facial recognition for a particular person

Report · Feb 13, 2024

I was trying to look at all pictures for a particular person that were organized and grouped through facial recognition. In trying to do this, I received a message that this person was being removed by Elements from the People Group created by facial recognition and I had no way to stop the action. Now the pictures remain for this person in my catalog but they are no longer associated with the person. This detached over 3,600 pictures from this person that were previously grouped with facial recognition. Is there a way that I can run facial recognition and have it associate all pictures again with this person. I did see there is way to reset facial recognition and run it again but that would seem to wipe all previous work I have done to identify people and it would force me to start over from scratch. Can I run facial recognition without losing previous work in order to have it reassociate pictures with the person that was removed? I'm currently using Photoshop Elements 2024.

Report · Feb 13, 2024

What were you doing and in which panel were you doing it, when you received the message? I have never heard of this happening, but removing a person from a People Group should not have removed the People tags from the person's files. If you go to a maximized file in the grid that you believe has been tagged with the person via facial recognition, the tag should appear somewhere in the People Tag hiearchy, the name should be listed under Image Tags for the file, and a People Tag icon should appear under the thumbnail if you are in Details View.

Report · Feb 15, 2024

Thanks Greg.

I was trying to load all pictures of my daughter that were tagged in Organizer under the People tab. All the sudden I received a popup that my daughter was being removed. I did not knowingly do anything to trigger this. I just received the pop up that she was being removed and I had no way to stop it. There was no prompting like in other software that warned me that my daughter person was being removed and giving me the opportunity to remove her or cancel the action. It just did it. I tried to click on undo but that was also not an option to revert things back. This seems like a bug to me.

I have went tothe grid and my daughter's name was similarly removed. I had to add her back in by clicking on a picture of her and retagging her. Now I have to manually tag her for each individual picture. Whereas, the facial recognition previously did that for about 3,600 pictures.

Is there a way I can trigger the facial recognition to run and automatically associate her or tag her for all previous photos to get back to where things were? From my reading, it looks like the only option would be to reset the facial recognition to run and run it from scratch which would lose a lot of prior work done done to identify a lot of people. I'm trying to avoid that and figure out out how to run the facial recogntion to reassociate or tag all photos of my daughter without losing all my work done with others. Thoughts and ideas would be very appreciated.

Report · Feb 15, 2024

Hmmm . . . . I have never heard of that happening before. And it would be almost impossible to do without receiving a stern warning message.

@Ken33792254hhqt said: I was trying to load all pictures of my daughter that were tagged in Organizer under the People tab.

Can you be more specific and take us literally step by step through what you did.

Which screen were you in e.g. the grid or the Named or UnNamed People screen?

If in one of the People screens, did you select your daughter's photo stack?

What happened when you clicked on the stack - did it open to Media or Faces?

Did you click to change which option?

If opened to Faces, were there any new faces for confirmation? If so, did you take any action to confirm?

If you were in the Media option, did you click or double-click on any of the thumbnails?

I know this is a lot of questions, but I'm trying to figure out what could have happened.

In the meantime, do you have any backups of the catalog? Unless you turned the feature off entirely, there should be some automatic backups that you could use to recover most of your work. You will find these in the following folder:

C:\ProgramData\Adobe\Elements Organizer\Catalogs\_AutoBackup_

There should be 3 or 4 sub-folders and if you click on the most recently created one, there will be a file named catalog.pse24db. Double-click on the file and the backup catalog should open. Of course, if you have the auto-backup set to generate on every exit, you may have already overwritten a good catalog. If not, select a backup folder that was created before the problem arose.