- Joined
- Jan 18, 2009
- Messages
- 2,587
- Location
- Fort Myers, FL
- Lightroom Experience
- Advanced
- Lightroom Version
- Classic
I've spent the last several hours playing with facial recognition. I like it a lot, with a few "buts". I thought it may be useful to share experiences here, so please do if you agree.
I did not process my whole catalog (46k photos) as I did not want to wait that long. Instead I would select a year at a time and process them.
The good:
- For the most part once I got use to it, the interface was pretty nice, easy to use quickly.
- I did not find any cases where the "similar" photos were not the same person.
- I found many, many cases where the guess it makes is incorrect, but the process doesn't confirm those automatically, so that's good, and very easy to mass-select and correct.
- The tagging display on loupe is pretty nice as well. A bit difficult in crowd shots, but not bad.
The bad:
- VERY often I went to type a name and found I wasn't fully in the entry mode -- each letter I typed then did something (i.e. shortcuts). Can make a real mess that way, very fast. They REALLY need a more firm way to lock you into text entry when doing People things. I also think there's a delay there -- type too fast even when you did everything right and it responds as a shortcut as opposed to text entry.
- I went through a couple years thinking this is easy and fast and... then I looked more carefully. I found it missed a LOT of faces -- probably almost as many as it found. In particular it missed faces not face-on, i.e. profiles, sideways, sometimes whole-frame faces. I went through a few shots at parties, sports games, etc. which it had completed, and found maybe 30% of the images had no faces identified when there were clear faces, and about 50% of the images had faces found, but not all of them. Here's an example -- it found the face on the left, not the one on the right, despite being (to a human) awfully clear and similarly visible. So if you plan to be fairly complete in your indexing, you are going to have to look at each photo.
This latter aspect is, to me, by far the most disappointing. It's one thing to go through and correct bad guesses, or fill in blanks, but to have to view each photo to ensure it did not miss photos is very tedious.
I did not process my whole catalog (46k photos) as I did not want to wait that long. Instead I would select a year at a time and process them.
The good:
- For the most part once I got use to it, the interface was pretty nice, easy to use quickly.
- I did not find any cases where the "similar" photos were not the same person.
- I found many, many cases where the guess it makes is incorrect, but the process doesn't confirm those automatically, so that's good, and very easy to mass-select and correct.
- The tagging display on loupe is pretty nice as well. A bit difficult in crowd shots, but not bad.
The bad:
- VERY often I went to type a name and found I wasn't fully in the entry mode -- each letter I typed then did something (i.e. shortcuts). Can make a real mess that way, very fast. They REALLY need a more firm way to lock you into text entry when doing People things. I also think there's a delay there -- type too fast even when you did everything right and it responds as a shortcut as opposed to text entry.
- I went through a couple years thinking this is easy and fast and... then I looked more carefully. I found it missed a LOT of faces -- probably almost as many as it found. In particular it missed faces not face-on, i.e. profiles, sideways, sometimes whole-frame faces. I went through a few shots at parties, sports games, etc. which it had completed, and found maybe 30% of the images had no faces identified when there were clear faces, and about 50% of the images had faces found, but not all of them. Here's an example -- it found the face on the left, not the one on the right, despite being (to a human) awfully clear and similarly visible. So if you plan to be fairly complete in your indexing, you are going to have to look at each photo.
This latter aspect is, to me, by far the most disappointing. It's one thing to go through and correct bad guesses, or fill in blanks, but to have to view each photo to ensure it did not miss photos is very tedious.
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