Lightroom 6 face recognition/people function help needed

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Grumps1974

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Martin
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I decided that I would catalog my entire photo collection using the face recognition facility. I wanted to be able to catalog all the photos of individual members of the family under their name. I laboriously went through the entire collection of 37000 photos and put names against the various people. Although time consuming all went reasonable well until the very end. I had about 1000 photos of my wife cataloged. Suddenly without any apparent reason this collection reduced itself to just 3 photos. The other 1000 or so had simply disappeared. All other catalogs are still there with all the photos of each person present. I have spent ages trying to find out why the photos of my wife have disappeared from her collection under the photos command but without any joy. All the photos of her are still on the hard drive.

On investigation the face recognition/people function seems to attach a keyword with the person's name to each individual file. The keywords are there for all other members of the family on all photos they appear in but not my wife's.

Now comes the problem. Why have the keywords been removed from the photos with my wife present and how can I restore them. There seems no way that I can re-scan all the 37000 photos using the face recognition function. It seems that once you have done this for the first time all future scans are for newly imported photos only. I have tried adding her keyword to some of the photos of her but this did not add them to the 3 in the photo collection.

Has any one any bright ideas because right now I am stumped?
 
Are we talking collections in the left menu, i.e. catalogue, folders, collections? If it's added metadata it should still be on the images.

I've not used face recognition yet. What happens if you use the library module and search for metadata. Is it a searchable term? It could be the metadata is still there but you've moved the images out that catalogue? Possible with a keypress when images are selected? Definately a count of 3 images against the catalogue - you've not a filter on (colour, stars)
 
Byker28i said:
Are we talking collections in the left menu, i.e. catalogue, folders, collections? If it's added metadata it should still be on the images.


I've not used face recognition yet. What happens if you use the library module and search for metadata. Is it a searchable term? It could be the metadata is still there but you've moved the images out that catalogue? Possible with a keypress when images are selected? Definately a count of 3 images against the catalogue - you've not a filter on (colour, stars)
Click to expand...

No - not there. If you press O on the keyboard it brings up a screen with the various people you have cataloged under their names and unnamed people still awaiting to be allocated to the appropriate catalog.

Metadata is a searchable term but as far as I can see it does not include the option to search for keywords. There is an option to search for text. This does filter photos and show those with the chosen keyword. My wife's name appears only on three images. All other family members have their names as keywords against all images cataloged by face recognition.

Definitely a count of 3 images in the catalog with no filters turned on.
 
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Sorry been out food shopping.

Hum, strange. I have lightroom 6 standalone, I'll see if I have this function and try it
 
OK - fired it up and started it with the staff portraits (easy source), so when you hit O or the face icon you have named and unnamed people. So is it you wife is now an unnamed person?

Does she appear in the keyword list?
 
I have to say, this would have been a great function to have when I was shooting Sunday morning football and Rugby for local teams.
 
No my wife is still a named person and she appears in the list of family members. Our grandson has 3997 photos in his collection. My wife 3! There should be over 1000. She is in the keywords for those 3 photos and a few others I added using the keyword function this morning. But those I have just added do not appear under her photo collection and I can find no way of adding them.
 
Ok - sorry been playing and learning this new feature

So Library module. in your keyword list you should have a list of your keywords which will also include the names you've tagged people with.
Whats the number against your wifes name?

If it's more than 3 - if you hover the mouse over the number (or just to the right) there's an arrow. Click that to display all images with that keyword assigned. You can then select all and drag them into the catalogue - I don't think it auto assigns to the catalogue. I'm hoping you've just moved or removed the images from that catalogue somehow.

If it's only 3, then some it's lost the keyword assigned to that photo(s), which means adding it again :(
 
Ah just noticed - you can do the same search from the library metadata search at the top. My first column is keyword, which has all my keywords including names
 
Byker28i said:
Ok - sorry been playing and learning this new feature

So Library module. in your keyword list you should have a list of your keywords which will also include the names you've tagged people with.
Whats the number against your wifes name?

If it's more than 3 - if you hover the mouse over the number (or just to the right) there's an arrow. Click that to display all images with that keyword assigned. You can then select all and drag them into the catalogue - I don't think it auto assigns to the catalogue. I'm hoping you've just moved or removed the images from that catalogue somehow.

If it's only 3, then some it's lost the keyword assigned to that photo(s), which means adding it again :(
Click to expand...

It is 3! I cannot understand though why the keywords suddenly got lost from my wife's files only.

Yes I can go through them again and reattach the keyword (mutter mutter means searching through multiple directories) but even if I did that there is no way I can find to add them to her collection under people. It would be easier if I could get LR to do the face recognition search again but that does not seem possible.
 
Well I give up. My grandson's collection which did number 3997 now has 13 images!! The keyword has disappeared from the others. What have I done to cause this - close down lightroom and restart it 30 minutes later, nothing else.

Looks like there is a glitch here.

Seems as if I have wasted a lot of time. Annoying or what?

Thanks Byker28i I appreciate your efforts.
 
No probs. Only other thing I can think of is are you opening the same catalogue file?
Have you a backup catalogue file you could try opening?
 
Only other thing I can think of for future is to turn on the option to write the metadata to the XMP sidecar file as well as the catalogue - it's in Edit, Catalogue settings, Metadata. It might slow down your computer slightly but I believe a manual method is to hit Cntrl & S

Other thing is - it must be your catalogue file corrupting. Probably best to take a lightroom backup Edit, Catalogue settings - general, backup settings set to backup when next exits then carry out some maintenance. see Scott Kelby's method:
http://scottkelby.com/it’s-“lightroom-maintenance”-thursday/

Good luck!
 
Thanks for the suggestions. I have turned on the option to write the metadata to xmp file. LR is doing that as I write.

The link you gave me seems to refer to an earlier version of LR as mine does not give an option to relaunch and optimize.

Again thanks for your help.

P.S Grandson down now from 3997 to 25 images. Weird as I have not saved the catalogue so file corruption should not be an issue.
 
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I think the catalogue gets written everytime you use it. Have you a backup catalogue you could look at. I have mine set to backup every week,
Edit, catalog settings, general, shows you where your catalogue is. They'll be a backup folder with a date and time archive file. Try loading the last one as a test (if it's recent).?
 
Last back up was 5 days ago. All my face recognition was done in last 48 hours. Not sure I trust LR now so I don't think I will be repeating face recognition any time soon.
 
Currently you cannot restart the facial recognition but if you are a bit technical and are happy to play with SQL... read from post 37 onwards

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1824933?tstart=0

Oh and apparently there is a workaround for individual pictures also.. Rotating a picture causes LR to redo facial recognition on that photo. Tried it and it didnt work for me..
 
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ianm2k4 said:
Currently you cannot restart the facial recognition but if you are a bit technical and are happy to play with SQL... read from post 37 onwards

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1824933?tstart=0

Oh and apparently there is a workaround for individual pictures also.. Rotating a picture causes LR to redo facial recognition on that photo. Tried it and it didnt work for me..
Click to expand...

Clever idea to reforce the recognition. Did you have it turned on or paused, you click yop left logo and theres an option to turn on auto recognition or pause.
 
ianm2k4 said:
Currently you cannot restart the facial recognition but if you are a bit technical and are happy to play with SQL... read from post 37 onwards

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1824933?tstart=0

Oh and apparently there is a workaround for individual pictures also.. Rotating a picture causes LR to redo facial recognition on that photo. Tried it and it didnt work for me..
Click to expand...

Thanks Ian - I had a look at this and although it does not seem that complicated I am leaning towards deleting the entire history of Lightroom - catalogues and everything - and starting from scratch.

Then again I might just give up on face recognition altogether!
 
An update.

I decided in the end to delete the entire catalogue and start again. This time the newly installed Lightroom refused to import some 20000 photos from my collection. The other 20000 were imported without problem!

So I deleted the catalogue uninstalled Lightroom and went back to an earlier update. This time my entire collection was imported and the face recognition feature ran much more smoothly. It has not recognised all the photos with family members (just over half I guess) but the catalogue of those recognised seems robust. So for me at least the fault seems to lay in the latest update.

I have found another way to recognise faces and import them into the people they belong to. Very long winded but it can be done. There is a good article on the face recognition feature below. It is well worth reading if you are interested.

http://photoshopcafe.com/lightroom-tutorial-facial-recognition

I hope this helps someone.
 
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