PSE 13: People recognition does not work

Report · Dec 30, 2016

After a reinstall of my computer I also installed PSE 13 again (using windows 10).

Since the last installation the people recognition does not work anymore.

After pressing the button to add a person a new window pops up and disappears immediately.

No further actions are possible and the screen before is shown.

It is not possible to add any further person.

In my older installation this option worked without any problems.

But now I don’t know what to do that it will work again.

I already installed PSE a second time but it doesn't help.

Thanks a lot for any help.

Report · Mar 16, 2017

This problem suddenly happened to me too with PSE 12. After reviewing this forum, I saw many recommendations to rename the BreezeSession.dat file to BreezeSession.old, however that did not work for me and it did not appear to work for anyone else either.

I noticed that there were many Breeze-xxxxx.xml files where xxxxx was a number from 1 to 99999, and the breeze-99999.xml file was created soon before the software lost the ability to recognize faces. While I could not find any mention by Adobe of a limit of faces, it appeared to me that the software was unable to recognize faces because a maximum number of breeze-xxxxx.xml files had been created.

I fixed the problem by removing all breeze-xxxxx.xml files and now my software recognizes faces again. Here is what I did:

1) In PSE 12 Organizer, click Help-System Info menu and note the CATALOG LOCATION.

2) Ensure the automatic media analyzers are turned off by clicking the Edit-Preferences-Media Analysis menu and unchecking the "Analyze Photos for People Automatically" and "Analyze Media for Visual Search Automatically" checkboxes and click OK.

3) Close the PSE Organizer.

4) Open the COMMAND PROMPT with Start-Run-CMD

5) Go to the CATALOG LOCATION\BreezeData folder with the CD command. For example: Type CD C:\ProgramData\Adobe\Elements Organizer\Catalogs\Current Catalog\BreezeData and hit enter.

6) See if you have a breeze-99999.xml file in that folder. If you do, chances are you have encountered the same problem I did. Type DIR BREEZE-99999.XML and hit enter.

7) create a new subfolder called "oldxml". Type MD OLDXML and hit enter.

8) Move all xml files to the oldxml subfolder. Type MOVE *.XML OLDXML and hit enter.

9) When the move command is finished, type EXIT and hit enter.

10) Run the PSE, go to the Organizer, locate a photo that had faces that could not be recognized before and try again.

This worked great for me in PSE 12. After the fix, all previously recognized faces were still there in my photos and speed of facial recognition increased. However, I am not sure how it will work with other versions of PSE. If you run into any problems, simply repeat steps 1-5 above and then do this:

6B) Move all xml files from the oldxml subfolder to the parent folder. Type MOVE OLDXML\*.XML . and hit enter. Don't forget the last period in that command.

7B) When the move command is finished, type EXIT and hit enter.