Lightroom 4 and facial recognition
On Adobe’s Lightroom 4 Beta forum, one of the most contentious topics has been the omission of automated facial recognition or facial detection feature. If you don’t get the distinction, one is the computer trying to figure out who someone is by comparison with existing pictures, the other is it doing only the first step in that process and finding faces so you can identify them manually.
While I consider it as important as of those two features, I agree with it receiving a lower priority than books and geotagging. Apart from the likely demands on the computer, the trouble is that if face recognition data is ever added, it will need proper provision to keep that information private if the user wishes. So rather like keywords can be marked not to export, data about people needs to be fully controlled – with the default being that it isn’t written to exported files.
I am certainly in favour of recording who is in a photo in a more structured way – using the existing Person Shown field but in a keywords-style panel and with image areas defined. I’m not against face detection or automated recognition in principle, just not if the price is failing to deal with existing weaknesses in Lightroom’s DAM features.
What do you think?
I could not get the InsiteGazing plugin to download – completely dead – is it still alive ?
For those wanting more comprehensive tags, or in the camp not trusting google (Picasa) … if you get hold of Adobe Elements you can use that products inbuilt face detection and auto image analysis. It is a very easy answer to managing tags.
Set Elements up to either do the imports or to watch your image library folder. Once you have done the analysis and/or face detection (follow the menus), go to File>Save Metadata to Files, and back in Lightroom go to Metadata>Read Matadata from Files. Works easy and no manual set up of tags.
You will also get other useful tags such as In Focus, Blurred, Long Shot, Medium Quality etc.
I prefer Lightroom’s correction functions, but Face Detection makes managing a large library much easier. It’s annoying Adobe still haven’t taken the technology they already have in Elements and incorporated it in Lightroom. Face detection is not just a consumer requirement.
There’s a new plugin in beta now that has integrated facial recognition into Lightroom. It’s currently only available for Windows users, but definitely worth a try. You can download it at http://www.insitegazing.com
The lack of face recognition is why I don’t use lightroom. I have to have it and that’s why I use Picasa. I shoot NFL cheerleaders at every home game and use face recognition to organize virtual albums for each cheerleader. A group shot with 5 ladies gets put in each virtual album. At the end of the year I have around 8000 pictures tagged and loaded into virtual albums. Because of time constraints I couldn’t do it any other way. I was hoping Lightroom would have added that feature because Picasa appears to be going away. I have got to find an organizer with good face recognition. I would have been so nice to use lightroom because it integrates so well with photoshop and all its other features.
I would seriously like to see facial recognition added to Lightroom. When I shoot dances people want pictures of themselves dancing as well as portraits. It’s a PAIN to go through 300+ photos multiple times looking for different people.
Would add a worthwhile dimension to photo retrieval within Lightroom. Should be available to those needing it as an option.
I’m with you, David.
Picasa did an amazing job when I set up my mother’s library there. Which leads to a point I haven’t heard yet. And that is that for many people – Amateur and Professional included – it’s not just about confirming facial recognition for new memory card downloads. It’s about importing a library of potentially hundreds of thousands of photos. I have about 140,000 photos in LR and the vast majority of it was imported when I first started using it.
It’s a daunting task to even comprehend the amount of tagging I need to do. Picasa’s engine and process for bulk confirmations would be something I’d think Adobe could have produced by now.
Picasa does indeed do face recognition very impressively, and Lightroom absolutely needs to catch up.
Some comment that, occasionally, face recognition gets a face wrong. But this is infrequent, and our brains are so good at face recognition that one can look at, say, 40 thumbnails of faces that Picasa thinks is Fred, deselect the 2 which are not, and then bulk-confirm all the rest, in a few seconds, literally.
Professional need face recognition less, but, for the rest of us, it makes the tagging process many times longer. I suspect I could face-tag my entire library given a couple of days in Picasa; in Lightroom it would take weeks at best!
I use Aperture 3 as my data base for all of my stills and videos. I love the program – it’s incredible. Great post processing software and a powerful data base with excellent features which include facial recognition. I consistently use facial recognition. Although it’s a terrific program, it doesn’t always ’round trip’ very well with Bridge/CS5. The program also plays ‘I’ve Got A Secret’ with respect to file locations. So, I’m considering making the switch to Lightroom 4. The decision would be much easier if LR. supported face recognition.
Adding metadata is painful enough. One of the most important tags to most users and myself is the name of the people on the photograph. So, if this could be done comparable to Picasa (works excellent), it would be a huge step forward. Probably, this feature is less important to professionals. I am not a professional. My bet is: most of the LR users are not professionals, but still like LR because it has great file handling capabilities as well as postprocessing tools. If Adobe wants to sell LR not only to professionals (which I assume, because they want to make money in the first place) but also to photo enthusiasts, they should definitely add face recognition!!!
Picasa’s implementation is well-crafted, permitting incremental tagging. It’s machine learning and heuristics make it a pleasure to use — and accurate enough to greatly reduce the time needed to tag people in my database. Adobe needs to do the same. My database is much less useful without this kind of meta information and too large to do without some sort of assistance. Adobe get your act together!
I am completely agree…Picasa do face recognition very well. I am dissapointed that Adobe could not implement this in LR4.
I agree. Picasa does an excellent job with facial recognition and geotagging as well. I’ve been considering moving to LR but am hesitant now.
Add me to the list with very little interest in facial recognition (though that’s at least partly since I don’t think I’d ever trust it and hence till have to check every photo and label appropriately).
Also a plus one for just a better implemented “Person Shown” field.
Frankly I couldn’t care less about facial recognition, but if there’s a demand for it, I certainly have no objection to Adobe adding it. However, there are other things I would much rather see them do first. I’ll be publishing a list of these on my blog soon. In the meantime, here are my thoughts about the Lightroom 4 beta:
http://paul-d.tv/blog/2012/01/13/adobe-lightroom-4-public-beta/
I bought a copy of Aperture 3 just for that feature, but found that in practice it is inaccurate enough to render it useless.
Face detection would be much more useful, specially if LR added the ability to add rectangular region annotations the way Flickr does, e.g. to put a name on each face in a group portrait of people you are not very familiar with.
I think that face recognition, until it is super solid, makes you lazy. Yes lazy!
When I switched from Aperture to LR about 9 months ago, I was surprised that I had missed all these easy to tag faces.
The other issue is crowds. Man, does it take time to say “nope that’s just nobody I want to tag”.
I discussed these issues here on my blog:
http://maximegousse.wordpress.com/2011/08/09/lightroom-keyword-tagging-vs-aperture-face-tagging/
Between 3 photographers we take over 10,000 shots for a wedding. My client says “Can I see all of the photos that uncle Jim is in. Oh and the one where he is with my niece.” Now I have to sit and go through all those photos vs putting in the tag and finding what I need. If it doesn’t then I have to look manually but it is a tool like anything else.
Considering how long facial recognition has been in iPhoto and Windows Live Photo and other consumer photo applications, I was really surprised it didn’t make it into LR4.
When I saw GeoTagging finally made it I was rather excited and I expected as I scrolled down to see facial recognition.
It takes a lot of time in LR to go through each picture and add someone as a keyword (and remember to put in Peggy instead of Grandma each time). But it is well worth it to me — I love being able to go back and find all pictures of someone. Especially with the new book feature that will be VERY handy.
Maybe in LR5…