People Recognition, Part 2: Picasa vs. Photoshop Elements
Since I wrote about people recognition in Picasa last week, I have learned that Picasa does not store its people tags in your files. They are saved in Picasa's database and will not travel with your files. Google has stated that they hope to provide the ability to save people tags to the files in a future update. A lot of people are doing the following as a workaround:
I've also been working with the new people recognition features in Photoshop Elements 8. Part of the reason this follow up post has been so long in coming is that I have been having some trouble with Photoshop Elements Organizer bogging down and crashing--a lot. To be fair, I am using a catalog of >10K images which originated with Photoshop Album 1.0 and has been converted with each upgrade since then over a period of several years. I'm currently in the process of importing my photos into a brand new catalog to see if it improves performance. I am hoping a clean catalog will eliminate a lot of these issues I have been having, and I will keep you posted.
As far as the people tagging process goes in Photoshop Elements, it does a pretty good job of identifying people, but the workflow of it is not nearly as streamlined as it is in Picasa. Here's how it works in Elements...
As soon as you start Elements 8 it launches a background process that begins analyzing your photos for various qualities, including faces. It will automatically tag pictures with one face, two faces, small groups of people, large groups, and a number of other criteria not related to face recognition. This in itself is extremely useful, even without the people identified. You can easily separate portraits from small groups, and so on.
Once the analyzer has run for a bit, you will start to notice little pop-ups in the Organizer asking "Who is this?" Once you name a person, you are asked if you want to name more people. When you answer yes, you get a window with a handful of people to name. After naming those people, it will start trying to match them automatically for you, grouping people with names and asking you to confirm them. If the matches are all correct, you just click the save button. If any are wrong, click the thumbnail and it will be excluded.
When Elements does not have enough data to do the auto-matching, it will present you with a dialog box full of thumbnails, asking which faces you would like to label. This presentation was very confusing to me at first, possibly because many of the thumbnails did not contain faces. The thumbnails are all dimmed with an X on each one, and when you click the thumbnail, it lights up and the X turns to a checkmark and in the next screen you can add names to the thumbnails you picked.
After each batch of people tagged, I got a lot of spinning "wait" cursors, and a box kept popping up with an "Updating" message which was rather distracting. I am hoping these issues will be resolved with a new, clean catalog and will post a follow-up on that.
Elements also provides a way to add people tags when it does not identify a face in the photos. Elements isn't very good at identifying faces that are tilted or shot in profile, so you may need to do this a lot. In these cases, you press a button labeled "Add missing person" and a box pops up in the top left corner. Then you need to drag this box to the face, resize it to surround the face, and then add a label. This becomes very tedious very quickly. It would be much better if you could simply drag the rectangle over the face in one step, which is the way it's done in Picasa. When there are overlapping rectangles it becomes very frustrating trying to grab the edges for resizing.
And then, after you expend all this effort to put the box around each face, the names are not associated with specific faces while browsing photos in the Organizer's thumbnail view.It doesn't look like Elements stores any data for mapping names to people's faces. (Adobe has informed me that this data is stored, although individual faces are not called out in normal browsing.) Picasa does, although it's only stored in Picasa's database. In other words, in Picasa you can hover over a specific face to see the name pop up as you browse pictures. Elements does not do this unless you are in the people tagging mode.
All in all, the people tagging process in Elements is not nearly as fun, fast, or intuitive as it is in Picasa. It requires a lot more switching back and forth from keyboard to mouse, which becomes tedious. I found that Elements presented many false positives in its face detection (for instance, in some pictures it thought a necklace was a face), and it also missed a lot of faces, particularly if they were not straight-on, posed head shots. Picasa was much better at only presenting real faces for people tagging, but then I wonder how many faces it might have missed.
By default, Elements does not store its tags in the files until they are emailed or exported. However, you can manually select all files and write your tag data to the files and this will include your people tags, making them part of the file's metadata and exposing them to other programs. However, it doesn't appear to treat people tags saved in metadata any differently from other keyword tags, so if you imported the tagged photos into another catalog, it would want you to go through the people tagging on them again.
I don't think Photoshop Elements is bad at people recognition, I just think it's more labor intensive than it needs to be, especially after seeing how well it is handled in Picasa. Given the other issues I'm having with Photoshop Elements Organizer, I'm rather disappointed with this release. But I'll keep plugging away and update you as I go.
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- Tag the people in your photos.
- Once you have tagged all the photos of one specific person, select all the photos of the person.
- Add a keyword tag for the person's name.
- Repeat for all your people tags.
I've also been working with the new people recognition features in Photoshop Elements 8. Part of the reason this follow up post has been so long in coming is that I have been having some trouble with Photoshop Elements Organizer bogging down and crashing--a lot. To be fair, I am using a catalog of >10K images which originated with Photoshop Album 1.0 and has been converted with each upgrade since then over a period of several years. I'm currently in the process of importing my photos into a brand new catalog to see if it improves performance. I am hoping a clean catalog will eliminate a lot of these issues I have been having, and I will keep you posted.
As far as the people tagging process goes in Photoshop Elements, it does a pretty good job of identifying people, but the workflow of it is not nearly as streamlined as it is in Picasa. Here's how it works in Elements...
As soon as you start Elements 8 it launches a background process that begins analyzing your photos for various qualities, including faces. It will automatically tag pictures with one face, two faces, small groups of people, large groups, and a number of other criteria not related to face recognition. This in itself is extremely useful, even without the people identified. You can easily separate portraits from small groups, and so on.
Once the analyzer has run for a bit, you will start to notice little pop-ups in the Organizer asking "Who is this?" Once you name a person, you are asked if you want to name more people. When you answer yes, you get a window with a handful of people to name. After naming those people, it will start trying to match them automatically for you, grouping people with names and asking you to confirm them. If the matches are all correct, you just click the save button. If any are wrong, click the thumbnail and it will be excluded.
When Elements does not have enough data to do the auto-matching, it will present you with a dialog box full of thumbnails, asking which faces you would like to label. This presentation was very confusing to me at first, possibly because many of the thumbnails did not contain faces. The thumbnails are all dimmed with an X on each one, and when you click the thumbnail, it lights up and the X turns to a checkmark and in the next screen you can add names to the thumbnails you picked.
After each batch of people tagged, I got a lot of spinning "wait" cursors, and a box kept popping up with an "Updating" message which was rather distracting. I am hoping these issues will be resolved with a new, clean catalog and will post a follow-up on that.
Elements also provides a way to add people tags when it does not identify a face in the photos. Elements isn't very good at identifying faces that are tilted or shot in profile, so you may need to do this a lot. In these cases, you press a button labeled "Add missing person" and a box pops up in the top left corner. Then you need to drag this box to the face, resize it to surround the face, and then add a label. This becomes very tedious very quickly. It would be much better if you could simply drag the rectangle over the face in one step, which is the way it's done in Picasa. When there are overlapping rectangles it becomes very frustrating trying to grab the edges for resizing.
And then, after you expend all this effort to put the box around each face, the names are not associated with specific faces while browsing photos in the Organizer's thumbnail view.
All in all, the people tagging process in Elements is not nearly as fun, fast, or intuitive as it is in Picasa. It requires a lot more switching back and forth from keyboard to mouse, which becomes tedious. I found that Elements presented many false positives in its face detection (for instance, in some pictures it thought a necklace was a face), and it also missed a lot of faces, particularly if they were not straight-on, posed head shots. Picasa was much better at only presenting real faces for people tagging, but then I wonder how many faces it might have missed.
By default, Elements does not store its tags in the files until they are emailed or exported. However, you can manually select all files and write your tag data to the files and this will include your people tags, making them part of the file's metadata and exposing them to other programs. However, it doesn't appear to treat people tags saved in metadata any differently from other keyword tags, so if you imported the tagged photos into another catalog, it would want you to go through the people tagging on them again.
I don't think Photoshop Elements is bad at people recognition, I just think it's more labor intensive than it needs to be, especially after seeing how well it is handled in Picasa. Given the other issues I'm having with Photoshop Elements Organizer, I'm rather disappointed with this release. But I'll keep plugging away and update you as I go.
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