XnView Software

There's some confusion on the program screens between add-ons and plugins. This face-tag is described by both names in various places here. After some fiddling and waiting for some response I worked out how to get the program to accept names put to faces. BUT the point surely is to get the program to label faces in new images, by comparing them with program data? How to get that working?

Other than that, this is a useful if a bit over-complicated program, so thanks! Previously I was using Adobe Bridge, but I don't like their poor privacy/security settings.

mechanic wrote: Thu Feb 10, 2022 5:08 pm There's some confusion on the program screens between add-ons and plugins. This face-tag is described by both names in various places here.

Where? It's for "AddOn" folder.

After some fiddling and waiting for some response I worked out how to get the program to accept names put to faces. BUT the point surely is to get the program to label faces in new images, by comparing them with program data? How to get that working?

What do you means?

Other than that, this is a useful if a bit over-complicated program, so thanks! Previously I was using Adobe Bridge, but I don't like their poor privacy/security settings.

"over complicated"??

xnview wrote: Fri Feb 11, 2022 8:59 am

mechanic wrote: Thu Feb 10, 2022 5:08 pm There's some confusion on the program screens between add-ons and plugins. This face-tag is described by both names in various places here.

Where? It's for Addons folder

Example: https://www.xnview.com/wiki/index.php?t ... ecognition

And by the way there seems no purpose in having two functions that do the same thing. Another example is the use of terms like 'tags' and 'categories' to mean the same thing.

After some fiddling and waiting for some response I worked out how to get the program to accept names put to faces. BUT the point surely is to get the program to label faces in new images, by comparing them with program data? How to get that working?

What do you means?

Oh, I thought the point was to show the face names on new photos before we need to tag them in detail?

Other than that, this is a useful if a bit over-complicated program, so thanks! Previously I was using Adobe Bridge, but I don't like their poor privacy/security settings.

"over complicated"??

mechanic wrote: Fri Feb 11, 2022 11:27 am

xnview wrote: Fri Feb 11, 2022 8:59 am

mechanic wrote: Thu Feb 10, 2022 5:08 pm There's some confusion on the program screens between add-ons and plugins. This face-tag is described by both names in various places here.

Where? It's for Addons folder

Example: https://www.xnview.com/wiki/index.php?t ... ecognition

Changed to "AddOn". Thank you for the hint, mechanic.

mechanic wrote: Fri Feb 11, 2022 11:27 amAfter some fiddling and waiting for some response I worked out how to get the program to accept names put to faces. BUT the point surely is to get the program to label faces in new images, by comparing them with program data? How to get that working?

XnView supports you by recognizing areas with faces and you add names to the face areas manually. XnView doesn't learn and recognize faces and assign names of persons automatically.

Thanks for the response, helmut, I think I need to spell out my issues with this in more detail.
I don't see the point in the program remembering the names unless they can be used in the tagging of future photos added to the database. Imagine for the moment that as a nosy/official/police person I take the photo of a crowd and I want to pick out certain people. This requires face recognition software which scans a photo and picks out all the people-faces, then checks in the database if these are known individuals and if so, lists the name of known individuals in the photo. Job done. This add-on to xnview doesn't do that. I'm not one of these people and I don't need the photo to remind me that I tagged people some time ago when I added the photo to the system. I'm still capable of remembering the names of faces when I view the photo in future, thanks. If anyone has a detailed case for the use of this add-on, I would be most interested.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and your use case, mechanic.

I think that being able to filter photos with specific persons in them can be a usecase. E.g. I might not quite remember in which years I met my niece Anna so I might filter and find all photos with Anna in my picture collection and lookup their date. That's can be quite handy and useful, I think, and e.g. modern smartphones can do this.

ATM, XnView's face tagging may be of some use but adding names to recognized face areas/regions manually needs quite some time. Therefore I much doubt that manual face tagging will be used a lot. Full automatic face recognition would be a cool feature but this might affect performance and people's trust in the privacy of their image data - even though everything would be still local.

I can fully understand the OPs point about recognition of newly added photos. I also understand privacy concerns, but I believe this can be done locally.

As many others, I used Picasa before it was discontinued. Picasa would show virtual folders for faces. If I'd tag such faces with "Peter" it would show a virtual folder with all photos for "Peter" and automatically add other photos it believed where also the same person.

If I remember correctly, faces that were recognized but for which no name/tag existed, Picasa still showed virtual folders to present them in a group (same person). They probably had a thresehold, like only show if same face shows up in X photos as I don't remember being flooded with lots of faces/folders for bystanders etc.

Newly added photos were either just directly recognized and added to a face, or if probability was a bit lower it would show with a question mark ✔ and X or something like that in these virtual folders Picasa believed they would belong to.

I also believe face recognition was handled locally (not Google's servers), it had to be enabled and/or manually run, etc.

Anyway, I'd love for this to be available. In the meantime I am restoring an old Picasa backup as a family member recently passed away and Picasa was a great way to immediately see all photos I have for that person.

If it helps, I can post a few screenshots how that looked like when the backup is restored (might take a while to restore from AWS S3/Glacier).

PS: Acdsee also seems to have this "Poeple mode" that seems to work like Picasa used to:
https://youtu.be/BmMAcZ16wZQ?t=76