Thoughts? In 15 is "Automatic" People recognition worth it vs Manual tagging?

[ear41]

Hi, Maybe I am old fashioned but it seems that the automatic face recognition is not worth it. Maybe setting up Keyword tags with names on it and doing dragging is quicker than the imperfect facial recognition? As you know you can highlight and then drag many photos at once.  I say setting up the names in the Keyword (on top of the list on the right in Media) because then if it does scan automatically  I will have it in two places?

Thanks

[MichelBParis]

ear41  wrote

Hi, Maybe I am old fashioned but it seems that the automatic face recognition is not worth it. Maybe setting up Keyword tags with names on it and doing dragging is quicker than the imperfect facial recognition? As you know you can highlight and then drag many photos at once.  I say setting up the names in the Keyword (on top of the list on the right in Media) because then if it does scan automatically  I will have it in two places?

Thanks

That's a good question. I am old-fashioned, sure, but my choice not to use face recognition has nothing to do with fashion. Note that if that feature is a good selling point for Adobe, I am all for it, I want Elements to be successful.

My points are based on my needs for family history and genealogy. I don't care to gather pseudo Facebook 'friends'.

- Face tagging means assigning a single tag for one person. I very often need to assign several tags to be able to find a given person: first name, familiy name, married name, nickname or even a 'branch' tag. That way, if I only remember the first name or the nickname, I'll quickly find the person I want, even with my feeble memory. That fact makes using 'normal' keywords together with face recognition an absolute must.

- I only care for a given category of people. There are many more faces that could be tagged than I really need. Face recognition works for nothing for those faces.

- Face recognition is not reliable for genealogy.

- Face recognition is the severest burden in the organizer. Don't complain for slowness if you are using it.

- Face recognition ignores photos of persons when their face is hidden or not recognizable.

- Tagging by keywords, is not the only way to add the information. You can include many names in a caption for a group shot. You can add a note to indicate the 50 persons in a group shot... The text search in recent Elements version will find a name in tags, captions or notes immediately.

- Face recognition requires a way to situate the face within the image. That's what makes the feature so heavy.

- There is no practical standard to migrate your face organization to or from a third party software.

That's for me. Some may have good reasons to love the feature, for instance if they only start organizing a big library from scratch. Even in that case, I think using the old persons tags at the same time will be necessary.

You could ask a similar question for geotagging. I perfectly see the point. But there also, you don't have the flexibility to create your own places hierarchy; you must follow Google Maps. And many users end up using a classical place hierarchy together with geotagging.

[ear41]

Wow! Thanks Michel for your very comprehensive, an understatement,  answer. Your raised many good points. I have one question: What did you mean by this: - There is no practical standard to migrate your face organization to or from a third party software.

What third party software, etc?

Thanks again

[MichelBParis · Accepted solution]

ear41  wrote

Wow! Thanks Michel for your very comprehensive, an understatement,  answer. Your raised many good points. I have one question: What did you mean by this: - There is no practical standard to migrate your face organization to or from a third party software.

What third party software, etc?

Thanks again

The problem is the way the location (coordinates) of each face is written in the metadata. As I understand it, there is some sort of 'standard' for that, but each publisher understands it in his own way...

You'll find many complaints about that from previous Picasa users (maybe Aperture? ) who can't recover that information when migrating to Elements or LIghtroom when they import the pictures in their catalogs. I suppose Lightroom can recover the information from the catalog of Elements... but since I don't use face recognition, that's pure guessing on my part.

[curtisbgtest]

I would say '3rd party' would be any other photo manager or online service.  And given the time investment, and those of us who have loved it but gotten 'burned' by Windows Live Photo Gallery or Picassa, it is a key question.   For me, given most of my photos are family even and the things people want to see in my collection are often themselves or others, having people tags is the most valuable and important I have (besides file name/event) with geo being runner up.
" suppose Lightroom can recover the information from the catalog of Elements... but since I don't use face recognition, that's pure guessing on my part."   No, stunningly, this doesn't seem to be the case or at least Elements won't recognize tagging done in Lightroom (nor any other program).  How consumer unfriendly and/or just plain severely disconnected do you have to be as a company to have programs that store photo metadata differently and can't read the other wrote?