Subject (meta) data not transferring to registered keywords

[wolph42]

This is not completely my cup of T so I hope I can explain this well enough for others to understand.

What happened:

I stored all face recognition data, created in Picasa, destructively on the photos (so its part of the metadata of the photos). Next I imported all the photos into Lightroom and turned on 'face recognition'. Two things happened:

1. To my happy surprise Lightroom identified the recognized faces correctly e.g. Jim and Carry on one picture were identified (with the face square) as 'Jim' and 'Carry'.

2. The keywords 'Jim' and 'Carry' were created.

so far so good.

What did NOT happen is that the link between the meta data and the keyword was created. So after Lr was finished scanning for faces I had e.g. 55 photos with 'Jim' on it. If I selected all photos in 'face' view I correctly got a picture of the face of Jim with a small '55' indicator.

However in the keywords it said "Jim: 0". Same for all the others.

One solution to create the link is to select Jim, press shift+O (edit name) and hit enter. This way the metadata is rewritten and now it *does* registers 55 photos in the keywords section.

However... I have 300+ names, spread over 15000 photos, with a total of 12000 recognized faces. Hence every 'shift+O' and 'enter' takes about 20 seconds to process and If I click on the next face too soon, stuff goes haywire (e.g. loupe opens, have to close it, or all of a sudden the name of the face is changed in 'O', etc.).

Hence my question is: how do I properly and easily create the (proper) link between the metadata and the keywords?

[Sahil.Chawla]

Hi Wolph,

Please go through these articles once:-

Use Intelligent facial recognition in Lightroom

https://helpx.adobe.com/bridge/using/metadata-adobe-bridge.html

Regards,

Sahil

[wolph42]

Dear Sahil,

Thank you for your answer. I already went to the first article as that helped me to get as far as I described above. The second link explains adobe bridge use of metadata but is of little help in this specific case.

Parallel to my OP I've discussed this with a Lr plug-in developer of this plugin: Welcome - P2Lr: Picasa Import for Lightroom and he concluded (what I suspected) that this concerns a bug in Lr: Lr doesn't associate the XMP people metadata to the photo from which it came. He's working on a workaround, however I presume this should also be reported.

Hence a new question: where do I report bugs in Lr, or is this the right spot?

[Sahil.Chawla]

You can report all the issues here Photoshop Family Customer Community

[johnrellis · Accepted solution]

...this concerns a bug in Lr: Lr doesn't associate the XMP people metadata to the photo from which it came.

The cause of this issue is that Picasa and LR apply the industry's metadata standards differently to represent faces and people, but each method conforms with those standards.   You can't call it a bug -- rather, the cause is that the standards don't specify one particular method.   See this post for details: Re: Face image region data written according to XMP-mwg-rs, but NOT read by LR. It should be straightforward for a plugin to rewrite Picasa's metadata to be compatible with LR's representation.

[curt_a]

johnrellis wrote:

It should be straightforward for a plugin to rewrite Picasa's metadata to be compatible with LR's representation.

I have read all the Lightroom SDK docs and done a bunch of experiments and cannot find a way to access the Region Name and XMP:Subject fields from within a Lr plugin.  The Lr plugin API has a very restricted view of the metadata and only supports around a few dozen of them. If you are familiar with Lr plugin API and have a suggestion, I'd appreciate it.

I did successfully use exiftool before importing to copy Region Name to XMP:Subject as you suggested, and Lr imported them and linked the keywords to the photos (sort of... a little flakiness but its a long story).  Thanks for that tip!

I would prefer to do it in my plugin but don't see a way to do it.

BTW, the shift-o edit trick described by wolph42​​ earlier in this discussion works as long as you don't have too many faces, in which case it chokes.

[johnrellis]

cannot find a way to access the Region Name and XMP:Subject fields from within a Lr plugin.

The plugin would have to invoke Exiftool to copy the region names into the XMP:Subject field.  (Lots of plugins invoke Exiftool to access metadata not available via the SDK.)  If you want to discuss this in detail, please post on the SDK forum.