Lightroom – How to use Facial Recognition

Facial recognition within Lightroom is a great feature for helping you quickly search and find photos based on people in your photos.  Once people have been tagged in photos, their name will be added as a keyword to the photo that can easily be searched to later find the person.  I have used this feature many times when needing to go back and find photos of a specific person, it’s very handy.  Now, It’s pretty easy to get to a good state, but there is some work involved and it really depends on the size of your catalog.

How to access the facial recognition module

If you have a lot of photos and want to run face detection on all of your images, I suggest starting it and letting it run overnight.

  1. Select ‘All Photographs’ in the ‘Catalog’ subsection on the left side of Lightroom
  2. Select the face icon at the bottom of the screen, just above the filmstrip
How to access facial recognition

How to access facial recognition

Lightroom will work its facial recognition magic and begin grouping photos together for similar faces.  If you have already tagged people in photos using the ‘draw faces’ box, then Lightroom will suggest photos that match that person, with mixed results.  You will either confirm or deny whether Lightroom’s facial recognition was correct, or correctly fill in the name of the person.

How to assign faces

There are multiple ways to assign photos to a defined person.

  1. Confirm that Lightroom’s facial recognition was correct by clicking the checkbox
  2. If incorrect, type in the correct name and click the checkbox or press enter
Confirm or deny the suggestion of Lightroom facial recognition.

Confirm or deny the suggestion

  1. Select multiple photos of the same person by holding the ⌘ (command) key and clicking on the photos.  Then click and drag the photos onto the face of the person in the Named Person section
Click and drag faces onto a defined person using Lightroom facial recognition.

Click and drag faces onto a defined person

  1. ⌘ (command) click all photos that have the correct name suggested and click the checkbox on one.  They all will be assigned to the name suggested.

Confirmed person view

Once people are defined, the option to find similar faces to just that person is available.  To access it, double click the person in the Named People section.  This makes it easier to find faces specific to that person.  The controls for confirming and denying a face are the exact same as in the main view.

 

Now that people have been defined, you can easily search by name like you would for any keyword!  This makes it extremely nice when trying to filter a large catalog to find particular images.  Leave a comment if you have any questions!