Elements Organizer Performance Issues Related to Face Recognition

[Shawvid]

My environment info:

• Elements Organizer 15
• Computer:  2010 iMac
• OS:  X 10.11.6 (El Capitan)
• Processor:  3.06 GHz Intel Core i3
• Memory:  16 GB
• Pictures and catalog stored on USB attached external drive

A couple different problems as described below:

• Problem 1.  Horrible performance after face recognition has run.  Performance was good right after installing Elements, but now is horrible especially for pictures with faces.  Examples of performance issues are below:
  • I bring up a photo with 8 faces in it.  When hovering over a face, it can take 8-20 seconds to display the frame around the face and the person's name. 
  • Selecting a picture in the grid view takes 5 times longer for pictures with faces
• Problem 2.  Resetting face analysis deletes a decade of tags.   In trying to troubleshoot, I 'reset face analysis'.  I was unable to find a complete description in documentation as to what exactly happens when face analysis is reset.  What I read was that the face stacks would be deleted.  I was hoping that although the face stacks would be deleted, the pictures themselves would still be tagged.  This sadly was not the case.  All previous face recognition work and the effort to map stacks to people tags was gone.  The worst part is it deleted over a decade of manual tagging that I had done on thousands and thousands of pictures.  Fortunately, because of Apple's Time Machine backup, I can restore the catalog either to the point where I have the facial recognition or to the point before I did the facial recognition where my decade of manual tagging is still intact.  The ramification of resetting face analysis and how it would slow the program to an usable point then delete a decade of manual tags was nowhere documented.  Completely unacceptable.  You are Adobe not some kid programming mobile apps in his garage.  I need to have faith in you Adobe. 
• Bottom line.  I love how face recognition has the power to massively increase the speed at which I can tag photos.  I REALLY need to use it; however, if using face recognition slows Organizer so much I can't use Organizer and turning face recognition off means I lose a decade of manual tags, I feel like I probably need to start using my Mac's native Photos app for cataloging.  I don't want to do that.   PLEASE PLEASE HELP.

[arshla jindal]

Hi Shawvid,

Please accept my sincere apologies for the inconvenience you have faced.

I would request you few things to help you use the application better:

Got to Elements Organizer preferences by hitting Cmd + K , and navigate to Media-Analysis tab from left panel:

Here you can un-check the option "Run Face Recognition Automatically" and check the option "Do not show Smart Tags". Clicking OK and restarting the application would bring these changes into effect.

Disabling Run Face Recognition Automatically:

This option switches off the face recognition engine which means it no more analyses the media any further but at the same time it preserves all your work done till now. It would not loose your already created face stacks and people tags. While Reset face analysis keeps the engine running but resets all your data. It's like asking to re-analyze the media afresh.

Enabling Do not Show Smart tags:

You can check this option to stop generating Smart tags which might be slowing your application if you tend to have large catalog. Read more about this at Using Smart Tags in Elements Organizer .

So if you would set these options as suggested, you application performance would better. As to analysis of media, you can revert these preferences when you are not using the application while keeping the application running so that the analysis keeps running when the application is not in use.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

Arshla

[pkhabu]

I'm running Adobe Photoshop Organizer v13, and Organizer continues trying to do facial recognition although I have it turned off.

What process should I look for to either prove facial recognition is still running or what process can I turn off or prevent from running. I have 31,000 photos and sometimes it takes 15 seconds for me to move from one photo to the next. This has been going on for at least the last three versions of APO I've owned.

[Shawvid]

Thank you so much for the quick response Arshla!  I will give this a try, but I have doubts that it will work because I did already turn off "Run Face Recognition Automatically".  Performance was still very bad - for two reasons I think.  Face recognition had completed anyway.  It displays in the lower right corner of the window when it is running.  It ran for over a week probably and then stopped.  So I don't believe it was running anyway. Also I don't see any indication at the lower right of the window that smart tag processing is underway either.  I'm only assuming it would display there just like face analysis processing displayed.  So my assumption is that neither face recognition nor smart tag processing is occurring anyway...but I will give it a try.  Thank you again for the quick response Arshla!

[garrys80646282]

I know your question was a long time ago, but I wonder if you found a solution? I have the same problem: Facial recognition is extremely slow with a large photo library. The answer you got, to turn it off to speed things up, is not much of a solution...

Thanks,

Garry

[gregm13177084]

I have just decided to let Adobe Photoshop Organiser import photos on my iMac.  i7 quad core 3GHz, 24GB ram.  This has completely killed my mac, slowed it to a crawl, i had to kill it before it exploded my 1TB drive which ran continually.

There is a problem with this software.  I am running the latest 2019 version, bought last week.

2018 was bad

15 was bad

14 before that was bad.

2019 is extra bad because the main function I bought it for,  Photoshop, takes 1 minute to open after a lot of hard drive work.  I am running High Sierra 13.2.  All my other programs run flawlessly.

I turned off face recognition etc.  I only have 25,000 pics, of course including stupid thumbnails and other junk it imported and it won't even scroll up and down without putting all 4 cores of my CPU to 300% !

I'm running ACDsee 4.x and it scanned my whole iMac and brought up folders and photos organised in 15 seconds!.  Sadly, I won't be using the latest Organiser because it is crippled.

[fotografffic1]

I don't know if this will help with the face recognition problem, but it wouldn't hurt to give it a try.

Increase the Memory usage:  Edit menu > Preferences > Performance. Try reducing the History States too. You'll need to restart the program after making these changes.

[mickb60946825]

I don't have that option, Edit menu > Preferences > Performance in Organizer.

For the record, I've used a LOT of apps in the last 20 years. This Adobe Organiser is the worst performing one I have ever used.

Windows 10, 64 bit, SSD, i7 16GB RAM.

Is there a patch due?

[fotografffic1]

I'm sorry. The Performance menu is found is the Editor. Both programs seem intertwined so I don't think it would hurt to increase the RAM.

In the Organizer, I also disabled automatic Media-Analysis in the preference menu (Edit>Preferences). What a drag on the program before doing this.

[cz35895897]

To add to the thread, with similar specs I5 15GB, but a 500gb SSD, it takes my machine 1 hour to process 500 photos in face analysis. I let it tun for a week continuously to let PSE2018 complete. When working with faces I never marked more than 20 at a time or it would once again slow down to a crawl (threads are in history for minor workarounds). Once finished I ALWAYS turn off the auto face recognition and smart tags. At that point you can use the face tags to create regular tags (old Google Picassa did that automatically). Then I use the File-Save metadata to files function. That puts the Adobe only catalog faces into a universal embedded into the Exif/IPTC field. Then no matter what you do with the reset of facial recognition, you will still have the tags with faces and everything else to use in PSE or ANY other program.