Facial recognition: a new option

[oversampling]

I want to share my recent experience tagging some 10k+ pictures in my DB in the last weeekend.
I have being using PSU since 2015 (v3 back then, and now v4), after a long due diligence looking for the best DAM for my needs. So far I am very satisfied with the choice: PSU is not perfect (no piece of software is) but it's still the best for me. Among the missing features is facial recognition, in my opinion a must-have feature for DAM software in the future (some of them have it now already).


Last week I come to know of a recently (April 2019) launched tagging software sporting facial recognition and I tested it over the weekend. Its name is "Tag That Photo" and it does just that: it detects the faces in my pictures (PSU does this as well) and it recognizes whose face it is. So that once I tag one face it automatically tags all the others belonging to the same person. Then it writes the tags and the areas inside the image file in the proper XMP fields (and it keeps its own database of course). So when I "read metadata from file" inside PSU I have my picture labelled and tagged within PSU.

Since PSU is still missing the feature (next major release maybe?) for the time being I will be using TTP to complement it. Apparently a single piece of software can't handle all the functions in the image processing chain well enough: now I have PSU for DAM, DXO for raw processing and TTP for tagging...horses for courses I guess...

[G8DHE]

Hopefully you will also be GDPR registered etc. a picture on its own including faces MAY be considered as personal information depending on how its used, but once tagged with a Name then it is ALWAYS personal information, as I understand the ICO explanations!
But I do agree it would be a nice option to have available! I do a lot of watersport events photography, so clothing/bib numbers are not always that helpful as they get wet and covered so only the face is often recognisable!

[rdv4rjm]

So when I "read metadata from file" inside PSU I have my picture labelled and tagged within PSU.

Could you specify which field in PSU, you could see people names displayed?

Thanks

[oversampling]

Names seems to be present as catalogs labels only (probably due to my PSU settings): however I can see names superimposed in the photo (see attached example). Face areas are listed in the "mwg-rs" XMP group.

Face recognition.jpg (2 MiB) Viewed 14624 times

[rdv4rjm]

Thank you!
Will explore this new avenue.

[Hondor]

Most automatic face recognition software seems dependant on machine learning in the Cloud. That is (at least to me) a serious privacy concern, and I would be most interested in a truly offline and trainable face recogniser, but I have never found one.

[G8DHE]

Been trialling this software out for a couple of weeks and have now just bought a licence. It does it all off-line and stores the data locally in its database and when licensed in the XMP data as discussed above. In addition when re-reading the XMP data back into PSU it seems to be able to locate the relevant label names that already exist. In addition it is adding NEW names that weren't in PSU into the correct structure under the People category, which I can't quite fathom out at the moment (perhaps its talking with Skynet!!) as the relevant structures aren't known to TTP at all and I was fully expecting the names to appear directly under People or possibly in Miscellaneous categories. Will have to have a think about that for a while, unless Hertz can advise if there is some sort of default ?

[Mke]

Interesting to hear how you've been getting on. Since it works off-line I'll try to find some time to test it out over the summer. Could certainly do with something to make tagging easier.

[G8DHE]

In connection with this thread, is there a function or script that can identify changed files and then re-read the metadata ?
Not sure if the PSU database holds a "last read/write" DateTime to compare with a files "Last modified" date ?
As this would make re-reading the changed files from TTP so much easier!

[sanphotgn]

In connection with this thread, is there a function or script that can identify changed files and then re-read the metadata ?
Not sure if the PSU database holds a "last read/write" DateTime to compare with a files "Last modified" date ?
As this would make re-reading the changed files from TTP so much easier!

Verify Folder and Verify Files.

I use Verify Folder all the time, because I use Lightroom to adjust a few fields in the metadata.

[G8DHE]

Maybe, I assumed that Verify actually read each file and compared with the database, rather than checked the dates and skipped if there hadn't been a change? Just trying to avoid having to re-read every file if at all possible. Not quite sure what the actual process is ... goes searching ....

[sanphotgn]

All from Hert:

Verify Folder will do a full scan of the folder that you start this command for. That includes binary file checking, new files, new folders.

viewtopic.php?f=57&t=27604&p=122070#p122070

"Verify Folder" is a bi-directional sync. PSU compares every folder/file found with what it has in the database. And also does the other way around by checking if what it has in the database still matches what is on the file system.

viewtopic.php?f=57&t=27415&p=121032#p121032

Checking only the modified date of the file would *not* be reliable enough to make it in DAM software. There are people who like to fiddle with the modified date, others use version revision software that sets file dates based on when it was checked out, and I could probably come up with more reasons why this isn’t always trustworthy. Verify folder reports changes, ever if the file dates are identical.

But a script could be written that simply scans through a folder structure on the file system and checks if files are changed and buckets them. That would probably work for you but not for others.

viewtopic.php?f=57&t=26916&p=119844#p119844

[G8DHE]

Thanks yes that's what I thought and what I'm trying to avoid
I may go another route and try to get TTP to output a list of files that it has written to, then use that with the Script:
"Read Metadata for Files in Text file This script will take a text file as input and for every file in the text file (one file name per line) it will read the metadata from the file to the..."
It will be a lot quicker than running Verify at the top level of my file structure!!!!

[G8DHE]

Yea, yes TTP keeps Log files of all its activities! Including a line;
"2019-07-16 17:11:00.8153|Trace|ImageFileManagerService|16[]|FileModified('P:\2019\03\20190330\DS7_0074.JPG', [hash], ImageId=>8115)"
So extracting the file name is simple and creates a nice simple text file to feed into the existing script ""Read Metadata for Files in Text file"
So will give that ago shortly.

[oversampling]

Yes Geoff, that's the process I follow as well.

Roberto