No—my concern is not about Adobe having access to that data; it's about that data being out there in the public space—potentially available to anyone who wants it badly enough.

If face detection were only a local feature (i.e. confined to your desktop catalogs), it wouldn't matter.  Since it resides in the metadata of a photo, it ends up all over the internet—sometimes intentionally, other times, not.  Sadly, betting on the honesty of strangers is impossible—especially on the internet.

The amount of people's personal information out there on the web is incredible.  It's hard to do anything on the web without handing over some personal information to some group, company, or person you haven't met.  Even if those people are honest and do all they can to protect that information, your information is not completely safe.  The last bastion of potential privacy is the anonymity of the physical world.  Facial recognition greatly reduces that.

• 8.1 million adults in the U.S. were victims of identity theft in 2011
• facebook collects your facial information whenever you're tagged in a photo
• every day, 250 million photos are uploaded to facebook

Why does that matter?  Because it takes a lot of bad, untrustworthy people to commit 8.1 million crimes in a year—which means that identity theft must be highly-motivating and very lucrative.  It also means that we're all at risk more than we realize.

From abine.com (full article here)

"A stranger snaps a picture of you with his iPhone camera while you’re walking down the street on your way to work in the morning. You don’t see him. He uses a mobile app to analyze the photo he just took of you. The app scans your face and searches the web for matches. In less than a minute, the stranger knows your name and contact info, is scrolling through your Facebook albums, and is reading your Twitter timeline."...

I would add to that: "...and thus, learns about where and with whom you socialize, where you work, when you're on vacation or away from your home...".   Do you want someone to be able to take your picture and gain information about your web searches, dating preferences, political contributions, place of employment, home, friends and family, etc?  I don't.

Sorting my photos can be done another way... e.g. one of the dozens of ways that work just fine without face detection: collections, sets, albums, folders, dates, locations, keywords, etc.

I have to say that I am NOT a professional photographer, but I do not use the colored labels. I have not found a good use for them yet. Of course I do use the star ratings and keywords. I have found that LightRoom gives even better prints than Photoshop V5 does, and I use LR almost exclusively now.

Well Adobe, keep going with face recognition out of LR!

Of course this could be a cool feature, but as long as LR and camera raw teams are not that big, there are many others priorities in my opinion. As a pro wedding, portrait and corporate photographer, I'm waiting for speed improvements, development improvements again and again, better local tools, multi users features, a better book module, shortcuts and interface customisations... and after all that OK for face recognition.

Another problem with that scenario is that it assumes incompetent privacy settings - even if someone can find my name, they won't be able to get anything more than my profile (and now cover) pictures from Facebook, and even less from Twitter.  I have no fear of strangers knowing my name.  It's up to everyone to protect their own online identity using the tools we already have.

Besides, face recognition is not a magic solution that somehow identifies someone out of the billions of possible people they could be.  If you've ever tried it in Picasa or iPhoto, you should already know that in its current form this technology requires rather a lot of human input to work at all, and it's very far from being able to do the kind of things you are suggesting.  On the other hand, it can be a useful shortcut for tagging limited numbers of people in a photo library, which is why I am definitely in favour of having it in Lightroom.

But I also agree with Rico - basic improvements to the software's performance would be a lot more exciting and welcome than face recognition.  I don't know that it's really that simple, but if it were a choice, I know which I'd choose.

I have a catalog with 65K photos in it, mainly friends / family / travel, etc.  I try to tag each photo with keywords indicating the people in the picture, but I'm not perfect about it.  The keywords let me create Smart Collections for each of my kids, etc.  Since I'm not perfect about applying keywords, these collections are not complete.

I would love to have facial recognition in Lightroom 4, so that I can have some automated help finding pictures containing people I care about in my library.

My pictures contain metadata about the people in them now (unless I turn off metadata on export).  Having help finding pictures of people doesn't seem to change the situation.

There are sometimes features in the final product that were not in the beta.  I'm hoping that facial recognition slips into Lightroom 4 that way...

I'm voting yes! Good time to adopt this and introduce this to the pros, too. Others have lead the way in opening eyes to see the benefits but now we need a serious tool to implement it and secure it for years to come. My objective is to document the past, old photos, for generations to come and people data is something that easily gets lost if it's not an integral part of the media, in the metadata.

Right now, I'm scanning tons of old slides. It's a slow process, and I have had to think carefully each step of the workflow. It was good to see geotagging the way it is in LR4, but I have no rush in post processing these slides until I have a solution where I can add both the geolocation and the face tags at the same time. The same applies to all those existing images in my catalogue - I'd better wait with the geotagging until I have the face tagging available too.

Face detection? I'd rather have efforts put into image quality, removal of phenomenae like purple fringing, good colors, dynamic range, a useful clone tool etc. etc.

It´s not essential.

Lightroom (and photoshop too) have a lot of features and no one really uses every single tool in there.

Give FD for those who want or need this to organize their photos. Just like Geotag.

Calling that a Gimmick, so LR NEVER should have Maps, Slideshow, Web, Book...

And if speed is essential, why a Print and Library module to take away my precious speed? LR is "just" a skin to the Camera Raw code anywais.

Keith_Reeder wrote:

 

TomIron wrote:

 

What about face detection - this much wanted feature? It's been there for quite a while in PS Elements...

It's not wanted by me...

 

I'm with you 100% Emile - let's keep gimmicks for the likes of Picasa.

 

It creases me up to read that FR is "essential" to so many people: what were they doing two years ago?

Doing what I'm still doing now, which is spending a whole lot of time in labeling captions on each photo, denoting the position of people within the photo, in addition to standard keywords. 

It's embarassing that a professional DAM solution in 2012 cannot at the very least allow for keyword tagging of specific regions in an image.  Facial detection and recognition is just the logical automatic extension of that.  But it's typcal for "professionals" to shun automatic tools. 

I agree

here is a feature request you can vote for:

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/add_possibility_ to_tag_a_specific_region_of_a_picture

this is the first step to face tagging, focus point,...

then we can have auto face tagging of course.

Would you rather have a feature rich application like aperture which gives poor output in 80% of the crud it passes off as innovative or something like LR which adopts new features slowly but perfects then quickly.  Let's take adjustment brushes, noise and sharpen for instance probably the most important features of any RAW workflow..  These features are simply embarrassing in anything else.  And people mentioning iphoto - well i guess too many hobbyists can spoil the broth, the same as half baked features can spoil the software.

All the above except for tethering... That's just inconsistent crap in LR

And Lyons, you're a big fat liar!

"I have no idea if that will change in the final version."

The essence of my message has everything to do with the topic but I wholeheartedly apologize if English isn't your first language...

Is it going to make it in LR4? No idea but here is an interesting interview with Tom Hogarty on Dpreview

One feature that some users had hoped to see in Lightroom 4 is face recognition, in which the software identifies specific faces in images and embeds this information as metadata for easier image searches. Hogarty says that when allocating resources for a new release, highest priority is given to features that benefit the greatest number of users. 'Face recognition is very important to some', he says, 'but irrelevant to others, leading to [internal] debates about what solutions are tackled in a release cycle.' Perhaps even more important, he notes there are serious privacy concerns about, 'the ability of software solutions to collect person-specific information.' He says that the challenges in implementing a face recognition workflow in Lightroom involve: 'privacy controls, integration with third party solutions like Facebook, tolerance for false positives - and the effort required to correct them - as well as the time required [by the user] to teach recognition tools.'

So instead of having a full featured face recognition couldn't we have at least
-Region Tagging
-face detection (detect faces but not who does the face belong to)

This would at first greatly help the tagging process, with little recognition errors (less than trying to recognise who is who) and no privacy issue as the software does not automatically recognise people, just make it simpler for people to catalog photos with people on them (which photograph already do, today, anyway)
Regards
Eric

Well, interesting to hear this internal things, Babar_e. But also sad, as I really hoped to see FR. As somebody else stated, the privacy issue is no issue to me: Now I do it manually, which is the same amount of information in the metadata but much much more work. Even a FR with say 90% accuracy would reduce my work by 90% (ok +- false positives and so on but hey, also 8% is nice). I think this thread also shows that at least a big share of the people DO want face recognition. And really, Adobe, cannot  be  worried about privacy that much, PSE now cannot only tag faces on photos automatically, but also talks to facebook. So, LR would be on a MUCH safer side...

best

Michael

Use Picasa and http://www.anvo-it.de/wiki/doku.php?id=avpicfacexmptagger:main

works better than Jeffrey plugin for me.

The only draw back is that PICASA may alter your metadata.

my work around to be on the safe side is to use Picasa with a copy of my photos and then synchronise the .ini files that picasa creates and that contains the faces information with the folder where I store my working copies of photos . from there I then use avpicfacexmptagger to tag the face in my working copies of the photos

next daw back -> I get the proper keyword in Lr but not the associated image region, that I can only visualise in avpicfacexmptagger, geosetter, or windows live gallery.

Actually I stopped doing it to long for me I hopped PSE 10 would help but not it does not store the region data in the XMP (same for PICASA) so it is useless to me

I hope LR 4 (or 5) will get it better, and at least I hope LR4 can read/write image region

regards

Yeah I don't really understand why privacy would be a concern here. It only becomes a (to most people minor even though I feel iffy about it) concern when you post images indiscriminately on social websites. Those automatically tag your images anyway! Face detection would be nice to have. Would save me a lot of work.

Hi john

I agree with you, privacy settings need to be part of the feature. But I would not call it strong: an option not to export the face metadata.

I do not see what else could be done.

A LR user is in control of what he does: if he tags faces, it is his choice so he has no concern about it. And as long as it stays on his computer no one else need to be concerned about it.

If he took a photo of you 2 solution:

-he knows you and can add your name on the face

-he does not know you , he won't be able to tag you name and even an automatic tagging algorithm won't be able to recognize you, so no problem.

If he decides to put the photos on internet, it is his responsability to respect your privacy, not LR. Even if LR has no face tagging feature, if he decides to publish the photo with tagged face, he will be able to do it manually or use alternative such as the services offered by the websites where the photo are stored (most of them have now this option automated ->facebook picasa google +,..., it is as easy as doing it directly in lr - you just won't be able to use it for cataloging)

that explain why maybe many people do not think that adding this feature will raise anymore privacy concern than there already are. It may even lower those concerns if the feature is bundle with the export option. Indeed without such option today, keywords all get exported. There is no difference between a keyword representing a person name and a keyword of a different nature.

I am afraid the best solution is to educate people

regards

I really don't think that privacy issues is what's holding back Adobe. I would think that implementation is. Some basic problems to consider are dealing with virtual copies (do you always assign region tags to the original file, or also to virtual copies), crop and rotate (region tagging is only stable as long as you don't rotate, or morph picture, etc. Anyone knows how this is handled in Aperture?

The easy solution would be to do region tagging on the unmodified file only, and then calculate it from there. But I can see that this would be a major interference with the current workflow, and probably architecture.

I agree this is fairly simple to overcome, moreover, adobe already has the technology to overcome this : local adjustment are region tagged for image rendering, and it works , whether you rotate crop or even distort your photo with lens aberration correction.

regards

Good idea, did not think of the first one, though it is similar to private location in the new map module.

And I am all for it