# Re-Enabling People Detection Doesn't Detect Previously Identified People



## Ian Farlow (Dec 13, 2021)

It's been several years since I have been around, but I am now thinking about reorganizing all of my photos. This go around I am experimenting with Lightroom (versus Lightroom Classic). So, I imported a few hundred photos and enabled People Detection, and as best as I can tell everything worked fine. Fairly quickly, the People view populated with suggestions for people that were found in my photos. I named some of the People, removed some, and merged some.

Because of some other issues, I then decided to start over. First, I turned off People Detection and deleted all the previously named People. I then deleted the Lightroom Library and started from scratch. I imported the same few hundred photos. This time, however, People Detection has not discovered the People I had previously named. To be clear, I don't mean that Lightroom hasn't automatically named them with their correct names, I mean Lightroom hasn't even detected that there is a person in any instance where Lightroom had previously detected a person and I had named that person.

I seem to have stumbled upon a rather odd issue, and because there is no way to manually identify people in a picture, as it stands I will never be able to properly tag people in these few hundred photos.

Thoughts?


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## Y.K (Dec 14, 2021)

The issue may be that you deleted the found people after you tried it the first time. The AI may have interpreted this as if you told it that it was mistaken about the patterns it recognized. Because all search / people recognition is done on the Adobe Servers, it may remember the “mistakes” it thinks were made on these particular photos. So seeing the exact same photos the AI may now be inclined to ignore them. What happens if you import totally different photos?

The above is just my guessing on how the people recognition on the Cloud works. It may just be a bug. But it’s safe to assume that since all the photos of the Adobe Lr customers are scanned on the Adobe servers, each photo may be assigned a unique ID (calculated by its hash). This way if the same photo is uploaded by the same or different users, and the AI has already established that it shows a cat or a cloud or some facial data, there won’t be a need to scan the image again: the saved “keywords” (cat, cloud etc) will be returned at once when you search for these items.


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## Ian Farlow (Dec 14, 2021)

What you suggest certainly makes sense. That said, late last night Lightroom started recognizing that there are people in photos, and even tried to tag some. However, while the ones I had previously identified and then deleted were highlighted, they were not grouped. Nevertheless, I have been able to add names to people and they are showing up in the People view once again.

Now it seems that some people I don't know and therefore don't want won't go away no matter how many times I try and delete them. It seems to me that People Detection needs a bit more work.


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## Y.K (Dec 14, 2021)

Perhaps the photos hadn’t had the chance to get scanned immediately after they were uploaded to the Cloud. But now the AI has scanned them and produced both their automatically generated keywords and facial pattern data. Who knows? Most people don’t realize that all is done on the Cloud and not on the local machine. That’s why you cannot search for anything while the internet is down.

I prefer to use the LrC face recognition, which after some training, is pretty accurate. Also the face image regions that it finds - or that I manually draw - can be preserved inside the DNG file (that I use) when I save metadata to file.


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## Ian Farlow (Dec 14, 2021)

Y.K said:


> Perhaps the photos hadn’t had the chance to get scanned immediately after they were uploaded to the Cloud.


Definitely possible, although after several hours I would have expected it to be done given there weren't that many photos to scan. But as I said, now I seem to be having the opposite problem in that I can't get rid of people that I don't want. Take for example "guy in red baseball cap and glasses" that is in 10 photos. I remove him either from one photo at a time by clicking the X next to his picture on each photo in the keyword panel, or I remove him in bulk by selecting the "Remove Photo from Person" option after selecting the 10 photos. The next time I start Lightroom, he's back. He doesn't want to go away.

Now it seems that Lightroom wants to randomly switch between Square Grid and Photo Grid all on its own. So much fun.


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## tspear (Dec 14, 2021)

You need to log into the web interface and permanently delete the images.  When you delete from the desktop apps, they are still kept on the servers for 60 days. So when you re-upload the images, you will see it goes a lot faster, because it actually does not send the image files again. 
The AI does not reprocess images which are "known"; so the deleted images are not processed for faces or most other meta-data.

At least that was the result when I was doing test conversions a few months ago.

Tim


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## Ian Farlow (Dec 14, 2021)

tspear said:


> You need to log into the web interface and permanently delete the images.


You can permanently delete the images from within the Lightroom desktop app. I've done that again, actually. I just removed all the images I had in Lightroom, permanently deleted them, and turned off People Detection. I then added 53 photos that were previously in Lightroom and waited for them to all sync with the cloud. Once done, I re-enabled People Detection.

That was about an hour ago, and as of this post People Detection hasn't found any people. I have checked the People View ("No People Found Yet") and individual pictures via the keyword panel. Nothing. I'll check again at noon, and then again in the afternoon.


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## Ian Farlow (Dec 14, 2021)

Lightroom has now found people in the 53 images I imported. However, I still can't permanently remove people that have been found that I don't want. I remove them from the photos and in a few minutes they come back.

Very odd, and annoying enough that I may just stop experimenting with Lightroom and move to Lightroom Classic.


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## tspear (Dec 14, 2021)

You can "hide" them which effectively is deleting them. Never had an issue with  the facial detection coming back.


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## Victoria Bampton (Dec 15, 2021)

Ian Farlow said:


> I then deleted the Lightroom Library and started from scratch.


When you deleted the Lightroom Library, was this just locally or in the web interface? There is an option in the web interface to completely delete the cloud catalog as well as the photos, and I'd expect that to be a better "reset" than just deleting the photos or the local library.


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## Ian Farlow (Dec 15, 2021)

Victoria Bampton said:


> There is an option in the web interface to completely delete the cloud catalog as well as the photos...



I'm not seeing an option in the web version of Lightroom to delete anything but photos, including permanently deleting them from the trash. Where should I be looking for an online option to also delete the cloud catalog?


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## Victoria Bampton (Dec 15, 2021)

Your avatar top right > Account Info > Delete Lightroom Library. That'll clear out everything (so make sure you have a separate copy of all photos!)


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## Ian Farlow (Dec 15, 2021)

Yep, just found it as you were replying. I'll give that a try.


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## Ian Farlow (Dec 15, 2021)

So deleting the catalog via the web interface seems to have helped, at least a bit. The recognition is better, but I still have the issue of people coming back after I have removed them from photos. I am now trying to hide them to see if they at least stay gone using that method.


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## Ian Farlow (Dec 15, 2021)

So far, hiding people seems to be working. However, there's a new issue: how do I unhide a person that has less than five photos and therefore doesn't appear in the People view?


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