Face recognition LR6 not very useful, usable, workable

[Dinky]

Lightroom Version Number

6

Operating System

Hi,

face recognition in LR6 is far from ideal. After confirming thousands of faces for a particular person LR still comes up with almost every remaining face, suggesting it as "similar"....

Then the performance is terrible. It takes ages before "similar" faces are shown and the "similar recognition"-process is restarted each time after confirming several faces, instead of carrying on with the suggested set and only restart AFTER processing the current set.

A lot of work needs to be done to make this usable and workable

Curious for your experiences

 

[clee01l]

It is what it is. Adobe introduced facial recognition at a time when "Everybody else had Facial Recognition" IMO mostly as a ploy to compete with the competition (Google et al). I don't think they have done much with it since. You won't see any future improvements in LR6 and if there are improvements in the future, I doubt that Adobe is putting that much new development resources into LR Classic (LR7)

 

[Jim Wilde]

I don't think they have done much with it since.

Apart from replacing the facial recognition engine in 7.3, plus providing the long-requested ability to reindex specific photos.

 

[PhilBurton]

Apart from replacing the facial recognition engine in 7.3, plus providing the long-requested ability to reindex specific photos.

Jim,

What is the underlying message here? That Adobe has indeed put resources into improving facial recognition? Or something else?

Phil

 

[Jim Wilde]

No underlying message at all. It wasn't clear to me that Cletus realised that those changes had been made in 7.3, so I provided the information just in case.

 

[tspear]

No underlying message at all. It wasn't clear to me that Cletus realised that those changes had been made in 7.3, so I provided the information just in case.

Jim,

Any idea on what the changes in the engine were? e.g. did they switch to OpenCV? If yes, what algorithm....

Tim

 

[Jim Wilde]

Sorry Tim, I've no idea.

 

[clee01l]

No underlying message at all. It wasn't clear to me that Cletus realised that those changes had been made in 7.3, so I provided the information just in case.

Jim is right. I was not aware of the 7.3 changes. Probably because I found little return for the effort when I first tried Face recognition. My subjects are mostly not people and the people in my images often are not known. Those that are known require a considerable work effort to ID and then confirm or reject those that LR found that were similar. Certain family traits are common and people like me, my son, my (female) cousin all got tagged with the same name. I don't know if the improvements in 7.3 can distinguish me, my son and my cousins, but I certainly hope it is better than the previous version that would suggest three dots as eyes and mouth and there fore a person to ID)

Unless your photos consist of mainly sefphies with friends, I still don't see a merit in facial recognition.

 

[tspear]

Unless your photos consist of mainly sefphies with friends, I still don't see a merit in facial recognition.

After my maternal grandparents died, we went through the photos. Often it was difficult to tell not only who was in the image, but which person was which.
One of the better things was on some images they had the names, and position in the image so you can see who is who.
Now, I do facial tagging back to 2002 when I went digital. It has come in handy already when looking for someone, to not only find which images they are in, but who is who in the image. My kids have liked this feature, I have also found it useful to make sure I tag the multitude of family members correctly.

I would say roughly 75% of the images I "keep" have someone in the image, since my album is more about family/friends having a good time visiting some place, than just an image of some castle/sunset/mountain....

Tim

 

[Dinky]

It is what it is. Adobe introduced facial recognition at a time when "Everybody else had Facial Recognition" IMO mostly as a ploy to compete with the competition (Google et al). I don't think they have done much with it since. You won't see any future improvements in LR6 and if there are improvements in the future, I doubt that Adobe is putting that much new development resources into LR Classic (LR7)

Thanks for that. In that case I'll just leave it and don't bother. It is inadequate anyway to identify people on photos, because it can only recognise faces straight from the front

 

[PeteGB]

Whilst respecting the view of the other posters I have a different perspective which might be of interest to other readers. I've been using LR since the start and currently have a catalogue of about 60k pictures, many of which are events and activities with friends and family involved. I do find it useful to have pictures tagged with the names of those in them. Not for every person I ever take a picture of, but for those that occur with modest frequency. Before Facial Recognition I did it with keywords. I've use FR since it was first introduced and find it accurate and useful.

It's not faultless but for me it works well and quickly. These things are always a bit subjective but by way of indication I run a modestly spec'd Window10 i7 with 16GB and after a recent family wedding I had about 600 pictures I was curating. Once they were ingested and I'd done the initial cull I hit the FR button and with no appreciable delay it came up with suggestions for the faces. Many I ignored as they were people I'll never see again but for the 20 or so family members that do have history in my catalogue I'd say it was about 70% accurate. Some were full face obvious shots, some were small faces, almost out of focus in the distance.

I was especially impressed with it recognising my granddaughter, who at 8 months old is changing rapidly and it nailed her in almost every shot. There were about 3 or 4 pictures where it clearly wasn't a face at all, but LR interpreted the image as such. Some misses are interesting, it mistakes a daughter for her mother for example. Some are just totally off. Despite some comments above I also was impressed by some shots that were pretty much side on, candid shots in the church where someone was looking to the side amongst the sea of backs of heads and with only 10 or so previous reference shots.

So from my perspective, if your image curation extends to tagging the people in your pictures FR Face Recognition is well worthwhile investigating.

Just my tuppence worth !

 

[LRList001]

I tried an early incarnation of Adobe FR and ended up with a terrible experience. Maybe I should try again.

For me it started out like magic, achieving astonishingly good levels of matches, very similar to PeteGB. Then as it added more and more matches, it started to lose the plot to the point where it was worse than useless so I switched it off and have never been back.