There is no “Not John Doe” option, which means that every possible match is shown, ranked in what LrC thinks is similarity. Once you have done that, you can drill down on a “Named” person to see what pictures are “Confirmed” and what pictures are “Similar.” Again, to move from Similar to Confirmed requires an affirmative call. If you have a Named person named “John Doe” and are presented with an image that is “John Doe?” you can click the check box to confirm it and the X box to remove the suggestion (clicking again removes the detected face zone, such as if the system mistook a 1970s stereo for someone’s face). After a while, the system will try to start putting names on “Unnamed” people. The top level of the Faces module shows you (i) “Named People” and (ii) “Unnamed People.” You need to name at least one “Unnamed” person to start. LrC is good at showing you different faces all at once, as single images, so you can get cracking on identifying as many new “people” as you have patience for in one sitting. The best way to use it is to use it on a few hundred photos at a time so that your identifications don’t swamp everything in your collection in a recalculation. To put it mildly, LrC’s face-recognition is processor- and disk-intensive. It’s OK, but not great, for face recognition. This is, indeed, the killer app for handling large volumes of photos, and becomes a single interface for everything. Something like Lightroom Classic (LrC) is designed around manipulating, filtering, and outputting large numbers of pictures at once. I’m sure Photos is really good for those funeral collages, though. I actually have no idea where these are generated. Or collections based on the date a bunch of pictures taken over decades were scanned (such as my 42,600 pictures apparently taken on December 12, 2008). Photos is, however, good for generating hilariously off-base collections of photos (memories) with weird auto-generated titles (“Celebrate good times” with a crying baby as the cover photo). You can’t really use it in conjunction with a grown-up asset management system like Lightroom.So when you move to a new application, you’re starting from zero. There does not appear to be any indication that Photos actually writes metadata to files.Hand-in-hand with this is the fact that you can never actually turn Photos off.
The face recognition process appears to be mostly (if not completely local), it runs in spare processor cycles, and in my experience, can cause kernel panic.For scale, my referenced Photos library is 250gb where my entire Lightroom Classic library folder is 40gb (both excluding original image files – so Photos sucks up 6x the space). Photos loves it some big previews, no matter what you do. Its catalogs are gigantic, even if you use “referenced” images.
My assessment of Photos is that it is not suitable as a face-recognition tool if you have hundreds of thousands of images, for several reasons: Either way, you can error correct by right-clicking the ones you see that are wrong. As such, naming one person can have the unintended effect of tagging a bunch of false matches. It applies a threshold such that if it detects Faces A, B, C, and D, and they are close enough, they are treated as the same (unnamed) person.
Unlike Lightroom, Photos does not presume that detected faces are unique. This tends to mean that face recognition proceeds by which faces the user thinks are most important.
To establish your Faces collection, you have to put names on faces in a frame where faces have been detected. It is not even engineered to do anything with folders except display them if that’s how photos were imported.įace recognition in Photos is incremental and behind the scenes: it only finds faces when you are not actively using the program, and over time, it batches up groups of pictures which you confirm or deny as a named person in your Faces collection. Think of it as your iPhone application on steroids. Something like Photos is designed to group pictures, more or less automatically, around people, events, dates, or geography.
The problem is that different software has different competencies. From a time standpoint, they may be your only choice. Then what? Face recognition features in software may be your best bet. But say you have tens of thousands of pictures of family members and want to print a chronological photo album. The most macabre application, of course, is the funeral collage.
If you are a high-volume imaging-type person, you’ve probably wondered how to deal with things like tagging people. So here is a question: what’s the best way to catalogue and tag your pictures? Is it Lightroom Classic? Lightroom Cloud? Is it Apple Photos? Is it something else? Maybe it’s a lot of things.