Automatic face tagging

Feature Requests
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#1

From what’s next

:robot: Add ML-powered face-and-thing tagging. As always with PhotoStructure, all computation happens locally on your computer. Your data stays yours.

Note that “face tagging” is actually a pretty substantial bit of work that will be shipped in several steps:

  1. Extract and browse by face/person tags already embedded in metadata/google takeouts (this will ship in v1.0.0)

  2. Add ML-powered face detection and aggregation (v1.1 – this will leverage existing face locii produced by 1., so importing a new Google Takeout that has person tags will be really handy here).

  3. Add UI to correct any face detection errors and manage person “aliases” (v1.2+)

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Support bulk tagging assets
#2

v1.1 would work without any Google tags of any kind, correct? The “this will leverage existing…” phrase does not explain how Google tags would be helpful. Do you just mean they’d reduce the local computation necessary for PhotoStructure?

I’d rather Google never see any of my photos, so I’ve disabled automatic uploads to Google Photos and instead use the OneDrive app to instant backups from the phone, and periodically migrate photos off of OneDrive and into my NAS. Although some of my family does use Google Photos as well, so it’d be a mix in the long term.

#3

Yes, absolutely. PhotoStructure doesn’t require Google Photos: but if you have a Google Takeout, it knows how to read the JSON files in those archives (and, frankly, I think Google Photos has the best face detection that I’m aware of–if anyone’s already uploaded any portion of their library to GP, they might as well leverage it).

#4

I have used Google Photos and now transitioning to PhotoStructure. All my photos are stored locally, which is what I will use. I have used Google Photos from face/thing recognition in the past. I have a Google Takeout of all photos.

How will I be able to use the face recognition already undertaken, but not include the Google Takeout photos?

#5

Howdy, @harrisc: welcome to PhotoStructure!

Are you not wanting to import to “high quality” images into your library (because you have your originals)?

Know that PhotoStructure does de-dupe these images, and should merge the original and the downsampled google photo copy into a single visible asset.

I hadn’t thought of this scenario: you only want the metadata/sidecar from your takeout?

I guess PhotoStructure could skip copying asset file variants when they aren’t going to be the “primary” asset, but still copy over the sidecar?

Or do you mean something else?

#6

I was thinking of not importing the photos as I had the originals, although Google had done some useful edits and collages. I have kept the original photos in particular directories which I was planning to keep.

If I import the Google Takeout photos and de-duped are they added to my existing directories or I still need to keep all Google Takeout photos?

Chris

#7

If you’re using automatic organization, the downsampled image from Takeout, along with their sidecars, will be copied into your library, because they have unique contents.

If the file is already in your PhotoStructure library directory (even if it’s a non-datestamped folder), it won’t be moved.

Lots more details here:

#8

I also suggest to add an option of automatic importing people from the keywords. Some well-organized collections might have people tagged in hierarchical keywords like Who > Friends > John Doe or People > Friends > John Doe etc. Giving a setting to choose this parent tag Who or People will be a good hint for the automated face tagging system

#9

What you described was added to v1.0.0! https://photostructure.com/about/2021-release-notes/#new-curators

I’ll write up a more detailed post about it soon.

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#10

PhotoStructure actually already does this! See the tagWhoSynonyms setting (it defaults to “People”, “Face”, and “Faces”).

I will be leveraging prior Region rects to bootstrap face centroids, as well.

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#11

Being able to pull from faces already detected from Google Photos is a vastly appreciated feature. That will probably be the point where I stop uploading to Google Photos entirely.

#12

PhotoStructure v1.0 does this!

If you have a recent Google Takeout, they started adding people tags to their proprietary JSON sidecars. Version 1.0 knows how to extract that metadata :+1: