Lightroom 6 / CC2015 - Facial Recognition Terribly Slow, not using all of CPU or GPU, still keeps going when paused.

Similar issues here. When showing a few hundert unnamed people, the interactive face tagging is so slow that it is almost unusable. Usually several seconds waiting time between clicks, frequent "beach balls", and also a bug where I can not select some of the faces when using Conmmand-click.

The whole purpose of this feature is to speed up a time consuming and tedious process. An unresponsive interface does not help in any way. I hope an update will fix this.

I am running an 2011 iMac 27 inch with HDD (no SSD), 12 GB RAM.

Same issue. I have 62500 pictures in my catalog and it took about 2 days to analyze. Tagging people is painfully slow. I now have tagged about 2500 faces and 77000 are unnamed. Many of them will stay unnamed but LR does not have an ignore face feature like Picasa.

Same thing on Win7 with i7-4770K 3,5 GHz, 16GB Ram and GeForce GTX 970.

Slow, slower, slowest and no System load while tagging faces

Another interface bug that I found: when editing the confirmed faces to screen out the ones that are wrong, LR regularly does not register an edit. I.e. I type in a new name for a face and confirm, but the tag does not change. This happens especially when I edit several faces in quick succession. So I have to make the edit, and then watch the interface to confirm that the wrong face really disappears.

Does anyone else see the same thing?

Once you are in "slow mode" you have to wait for every action. Even selecting multiple images with ctrl+click (on win) takes sometimes more than 5 seconds. I speak from the white border that says: "yes, you have selected an image"

Same here, insanely slow to do anything.

Just trying to rename one face takes a good 45 seconds or more before the UI updates with the name change.

Quad 4GHz

32GB Ram

550MB read/write SSD

Nvidia 680

Windows 8.1 Pro x64

I am reviewing 220K photos -- it's extremely painful.  So painful that my wife doesn't want me on the computer any more, since all I'm trying to do (for hours) is combat the swelling tide of thousands of photos.

And you name it -- tires, sand, grass -- it tries to name it -- not to mention pets!

I'm surprised at how poor it is in differentiating different people, tires, pets, etc. -- many of them it says are all the same person / pet -- ??

And the speed is unbelievably slow.

This is almost so painful I wish I'd never started it -- sad.

And ditto here too. Great idea, poor implmentation. In it's current state this feature is totally unusable (other than a handful of small galleries). Trying to work with 1000's or 10's of thousands of images grinds the process to a crawl. Constanst screen reloads, lags, freezes etc. Needs major work. Rather fustrating as it's the main reason I upgraded from LR5 which itself was only purchased a few months back. I'm seriously condsidering a request for refund.

Now I'm experiencing data loss.  The faces I've detected just got kicked out -- like 1,500 of them.

I called Adobe, waited on hold for a while, and some guy picked up, acting like I was bothering him (??).  When I started explaining my problem, he HUNG UP -- !!

This version is junk -- sorry, it is.

Yes same here - MacPro Late 2013 3.5GHz Hex Core, 16GB, catalog on SSD...

Face recognition is painfully slow, seems to run on a single core, and very slow to just go through select faces to be confirmed, which is peculiar as just selecting isn't supposed to be a CPU intensive operation.

Same performance observation when running over the whole catalog of 120k pictures, slows down.

Generally speaking I need to quit and restart lightroom to get back decent performance in all face recognition related operations.

Forget it if someone's oriented in profile or has sunglasses on. It offers you cartoons on magazine covers and billboards, patches of lawn, people of multiple races and genders, and never narrows the range of whacky suggestions no matter how many faces you confirm.

My wife was in the room when it asked me if an Emperor Palpatine PEZ dispenser was her (and she's an attractive woman!). She got pissed off at ME.

This feature is poorly conceived and executed and an uncharacteric misstep for an otherwise great program—enough so that it shakes my confidence in its future development.

I have excatly the same experiences here.

1. Tagging is very slow. I type a name and it takes 5-7 seconds to register.

2. When under one person and confirmed photos, if I change name of wrongly tagged photo. About 70% of the time it just says "added to xxxnn", but does not change the tag. I have to edit keyword tag manually

3. When under one person I confirm photos, they are added to confirmed. My view scrolls up a lot and I have to painfully slowly to scroll back where I was before confiming. It would be great if I could just view the similar faces view and work on that without the view switching to confirmed photos all the time.

4. Scrolling is VERY VERY slow.

how in the world was this version released?

it's like a massive oxymoron -- "from the same company that brought you photoshop and lightroom, now a virtually unusable and freshman beta of face recognition" --

-- baffling.

It's like something from the 1990s.

I've been using Face recogition in Google Picassa for years. It's 10x better/faster - and free! I can't believe that Adobe after all this time, still can't figure out how to implement a now mature technology that's been around for years. I've been hanging out to have this feature integrated into LR, but sadly disappointed.

i have the same issues plus these two:

BUG: Face Recognition splatters Face Tag rectangles all over my Images

LIGHTROOM 6 Facial recognition runs amok

LIGHTROOM: facial recognition data not saved - potential data loss

and as i wrote in another post.. i agree adobe should get help from google to get face recognition right.

I agree it should identify photographic faces on magazine covers and billboards, which is why I specified "cartoon" illustrations. It seems like it should be able to tell the difference between the primitive drawing of a queen on a playing card and a real person, but Adobe's own training video shows it mistaking a playing card for a person. Maybe I'm asking too much, though. I'd be happy if it compared faces across my entire library instead of just within folders, if the results narrowed the suggestions instead of expanding them, and if the spinning wheels would go away.

Christopher, your blog post is terrific! I arrived at basically the same set of workarounds and tips while working with the program over the last week.

Like you say, better speed would help a lot but the feature itself also doesn't seem that effective at actually identifying people and doesn't seem to use the timeline at all, sometimes identifying the same person as an 80 year old in a photo from 2008 and an infant in a photo from 2013. I understand you'd like to restrict this thread to performance issues but it seems these things must be connected: if Lightroom made fewer false positives and used more tools in its algorithm, including detecting when a shot is part of a burst of shots of the same person, and grouped rejected faces as well as confirmed faces, it would run faster. And in any case, having to correct trivial errors and then wait twenty seconds between clicks is a big bottleneck to productivity. Accuracy is connected to speed in that regard, too. Cheers.

"Like you say, better speed would help a lot but the feature itself also doesn't seem that effective at actually identifying people and doesn't seem to use the timeline at all, sometimes identifying the same person as an 80 year old in a photo from 2008 and an infant in a photo from 2013. I know you'd like to restrict the thread to performance issues but it seems these things must be connected: if Lightroom made fewer false positives and used more tools in its algorithm, including detecting when a shot is part of a burst of shots of the same person, and grouped rejected faces as well as confirmed faces, it would run faster."

omg -- this is some pretty deep stuff -- much deeper than LR could ever do, that's for sure -- !!

imagine the feature actually working.

i mean, they've taken an "upgrade feature" and basically killed LR with it.  there's no way to shut off face recognition, and it slows down your usage to a crawl.

to me, it's almost like a bug living in the software -- and there's no way to get rid of it --

for sure it is slow. even aperture, which had not been updated for years, would do this way faster.

Face recognition can be paused.  Hover the cursor over your Identity Plate, top left corner of the corner of the screen.  Click the ID plate. Options appear to pause Face Recognition and Address Lookup. 

actually, alksaki, it pauses the name-guessing, but still plows through the faces, from what i've found, and just gives you a laundry list of "?" faces.

i'm FINALLY at 25% to go on 218K photos -- i feel like i'm reaching nirvana or something.

this is after 2 weeks of continuous process and fighting with my wife, because she thinks i spend too much time with "faces" on the computer -- which i do.

but you know, if you don't, then you just have a boatload of "?" because subsequent scans can't be matched.

pathetic -- me and LR6.

crsouser - fantastic recommendation -- thank you!!  who would have thought -- !!!

edgduke, thanks for the reply.  Adding names to faces in the past was something I often forgot to do.  Now, we have a way to find those faces.  Right now they are a boatload of ?'s. LOL.  My wife thinks I spend too much time in front of the computer, too.  She will be pleasantly surprised when I can quickly find images of the kids and grandkids.

I was looking for a way to improve performance when working on images.  When the Face Detection under the Identity Plate is paused, the CPU core usage drops to a much lower level.  So, I think Face Recognition stops looking at ALL the images that have been imported over time.  The 'pausing" let LR6 work a little faster. 

In the paused state, the People icon below the grid activates "Detecting Faces in Filmstrip".  The People grid appears and populates with faces from the selected folder.  The CPU usage goes way up.  After editing names and deleting unwanted "face areas", the CPU usage goes way down.

It seems that the computer must stay running while scanning all the images to the very end.  I was about halfway through 254K images and shutdown.  On the next opening of LR, it started scanning all 254K again. Yikes!

crouser, thanks for the tips.  I've been using LR6 for just a few days.  As you mentioned, I found that pausing the face search on the entire catalog helps performance while editing. I will go to your blog for your other helpful tips.

Same here 360k catalog, been running for about 70% of the time for 1.5 weeks...139k to go

SSD Catalog, RAID 0 (3 x 4tb/7200RPM)

Lightroom version: CC 2015.0.1 [ 1018573 ]

License: Creative Cloud

Operating system: Windows 8.1 Business Edition

Version: 6.3 [9600]

Application architecture: x64

System architecture: x64

Logical processor count: 12

Processor speed: 3.3 GHz (OC 4.0Ghz)

Built-in memory: 16279.2 MB

Real memory available to Lightroom: 16279.2 MB

Real memory used by Lightroom: 4177.4 MB (25.6%)

Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 4366.8 MB

Memory cache size: 3050.9 MB

Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 6

Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2,AVX,AVX2

System DPI setting: 120 DPI

Desktop composition enabled: Yes

Displays: 1) 2560x1600, 2) 3840x2160

Input types: Multitouch: No, Integrated touch: No, Integrated pen: No, External touch: No, External pen: No, Keyboard: No

Graphics Processor Info:

GeForce GTX 780/PCIe/SSE2

Check OpenGL support: Passed

Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation

Version: 3.3.0 NVIDIA 347.52

Renderer: GeForce GTX 780/PCIe/SSE2

LanguageVersion: 3.30 NVIDIA via Cg compiler

Adapter #1: Vendor : 10de

  Device : 1004

  Subsystem : 36041458

  Revision : a1

  Video Memory : 2962

Adapter #2: Vendor : 1414

  Device : 8c

  Subsystem : 0

  Revision : 0

  Video Memory : 0

AudioDeviceIOBlockSize: 1024

AudioDeviceName: Speakers (Realtek High Definition Audio)

AudioDeviceNumberOfChannels: 2

AudioDeviceSampleRate: 44100

Build: Uninitialized

Direct2DEnabled: false

GPUDevice: not available

OGLEnabled: true

A big problem continues to be that once you wait for it to index all your faces you find it missed over half of them. There are many cases where it missed the subject of the photo but managed to find a tiny waiter off in the shadows. I don't know how this will ever get fixed; it seems it'll require an update that lets you rerun the indexing a few times, maybe with different levels of granularity. I doubt that's coming.

It stands to reason that a system that hands you thousands of false positives for every face can't recognize if something is or isn't a face in over half the cases. Faces in profile or tilted down, especially with the eyes looking down, are bypassed completely. I have directories with a thousand people shots in them, many with multiple people, and instead of LR6 returning an index of 1.5k or so, it gives me 385. I'm not sure how valuable the search advantages will be in this case; I can see it not returning some favorite shots of people.

Anyway, for anyone looking to get past the spinning wheels, work on one directory at a time. Then once a directory is done, keep it selected so you have the same thumbnails of identified faces in the confirmed area, and control-select the next directory. You won't have to reseed the confirmed faces area this way and things move much faster when you're not working with the entire library. It also helps to click each person in the confirmed faces and work in that view sometimes. It'll return faces of family members of that person and you can rename those. You can watch it focus its top results as you confirm but, annoyingly, it doesn't narrow the total suggestions but actually expands them the more faces you confirm and the fewer correct positives remain. (This seems opposite to how it should work. It should give you fewer faces the more you confirm as it gets a better idea what the person looks like and has fewer shots left unconfirmed of that person.)  Yet, even with the expanded results, faces will still escape it and pop up in other people's results as false positives.

Bottom line: It's only a little better than manual tagging, and not as thorough because of the poor hit rate of the initial indexing. But it works better if you stick to isolated directories and occasionally individual people. At least that way you don't have to wait for it to re-sort tens of thousands of results with every click.

It is the same with my machine here: MacBook Pro with 8 GB RAM. There is no difference if the pics are on the local SSD or the external USB 3.0 hard drive. The interface is terribly slow. For my 60.000 pics it is not usable at all. Picasa worked like a charm on the same folders. At the moment the long hoped feature is of no use in LR6.

Same Problem here!

ADOBE, WHAT IS THE SOLUTION?

Is it possible to permanently turn off the face recognition feature until Adobe corrects the problem?

Same here., although I am using a PC running Windows 8.1.

Locating the faces took three days, and recognition is dreadful; far less accurate than Google Picasa!

Worst of all, since I turned on face recognition and pointed it at my whole catalogue, the Catalogue now takes an absolute age to start up, whereas before it was pretty instant.

Unless Adobe come out with a fix in the next few weeks, I shall probably write off the time spent setting up face recognition and revert to an earlier version of my catalogue.

Very poor implementation, because not only does it not work very well, it makes the entire application less productive.

I'll add my machine to the problem:

Windows 7

intel i5 processor

16 GB RAM

Forever to respond when tagging when anything more than a few dozen faces are in the group.

Also, it seems to randomly highlight people after the name assignment is done. The result is that  sometimes random people are assigned random names making the it even harder for the face recognition to work properly. Its confused.

NEW FEATURE REQUEST: The ability to use the paint tool to tag people.

Same. It has taken me the several weeks since release to index my faces. When I now look and I want to name some of the question marks, after everything I do (I name a face, or I confirm a guessed name) I get to wait 30-60 seconds until I can do anything else. Spinning beach ball meanwhile.

Groan: I do hope updates, and speedy updates, fix this. I do this for a living and while hobbyists with 1000 photos will not notice this speed loss, I certainly do and it's hard top swallow.