Migrating from Aperture to Lightroom: how do you replace the Faces feature in AP?

[MarathonMax]

I have recently switched from Aperture 3 to Lightroom 3. The purpose of this post is not to repeat the reasons for that switch, nor is it to say that LR3 is better than AP3.

Switching has required that I give up on using Faces in AP3. I kind of liked that feature as it allowed me to quickly tag who is who on each shot. And I must say that here the integration with the iPad is kind of well done.

When I exported my Aperture library, AP added the face name keyword to each tagged pics. This way, in Lightroom, I could still see which pictures was tagged with which faces – although it would not “zoom” to the face itself.

Today I use keywords to tag people in LR. I have written this blog post about this here.

And I realize now that Aperture has made me “lazy” about tagging people.

I would like to hear from others what you guys and girls have done about this, if anything at all.

Tks

Max

 

[LouieSherwin]

Hi Max,

I just use keywords. I don't know that there is really any better solution at this point. I do suggest that you go over to Photoshop Feedback site. I am sure that I have seen suggestions there to have a "faces" like feature added to LR. You can add your own suggestions or add you vote for any that are already there.

-louie

 

[Gene McCullagh]

Hi Max!

I agree. Just get in the habit of keywording the people in the shot. You could also create smart collections for each person if you wanted a quick way to see all the Alice shots or the Brian shots for example.

 

[LouieSherwin]

Max,

I have another thought about keywording people. If you are posting these images to the web you may not want these to be included. In Lightroom when you create a keyword it is set as "exportable" by default.

You can change this attribute by double clicking the keyword in the "Keywords List" panel and un-checking the "include on export" checkbox. I do this for a lot of keywords that I just want to keep private or are just for personal annotations and just would not make sense to a broad audience. I keep all these in a top level called "PRIVATE" and from time to time export all my keywords to a text file and check to see for any I have created and did not un-check the export. A keyword that is not exported is show in side of square brackets for example [Louie].

Right now in Lightroom you can only edit keywords one by one which can be a bit tedious but there are feature requests to change this an generally enhance the whole keyword input and editing process over in the Photoshop Family Feedback site.

-louie

 

[MarathonMax]

I like your thought about excluding keywords on export.

 

[Gene McCullagh]

Great tip Louie! Thanks!