Using Face
Recognition
Lightroom incorporates advanced facial recognition technology to
help put names to the faces in your photos. It’s remarkably effective at
recognising the same face, even under unusual conditions, but it does
need a bit of help.
1
To get started with the facial recognition system, go to
the Library Grid view. On the bar at the bottom of the
view window you’ll see the row of viewing option buttons that
we discussed earlier, and next to them a button with a face on
it. This is the People button; click on it or alternatively use the
hotkey shortcut O.3
Click on the ‘Start finding faces...’ button and the program
will start going through your image library looking for
faces. If you have a collection of thousands of images with
many of them containing people, this process may take a long
time. For example, a collection of more than 50,000 images
could take around 24 hours.2 If this is your first time using the facial recognition system,
you’ll see an introduction screen with two options. You can
choose either to fun face recognition on your entire catalogue
of images or to just use it as needed. The first option will
produce more useful results in the long run but the second is
more convenient for a single image.4 If you are able to leave your PC switched on overnight, you
can leave the search running and it should be complete by
the morning. If not, don’t worry. You can close the program and
switch off your PC safely. The search will resume the next time
you start Lightroom and will carry on running in the background.52
GETTING ORGANISED: THE LIBRARY MODULE
BDM’s Made Easy Series | Volume 22