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Face recognition and fast People tagging in Windows Live Photo Gallery

Submitted by burnblue on March 7, 2009 to Usability

WLPG has People tags and face detection (that sometimes works), but these features do not currently do enough to be useful. Photo Gallery lacks face -recognition- and will not scan your library for you and offer to tag similar faces. This makes it very tedious to organize our galleries around People Tags.

Implement face recognition similar to what is done in Picasa Web albums ( http://www.macworld.com.au/data/e/2/2/135300-pi...ce-recognition-584.jpg ) and in iPhoto 09 ( http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/images/overlay_organize_02_20090106.png)

Once we associate a few faces with People Tags, offer to scan through our library for faces similar to the one we've chosen, and give us the ability to apply tags in a batch.

This solution would also require that detecting when faces are in a photo be improved.

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Not fixed

Discussion (9 comments)

jamiet wrote on March 8, 2009, 5:41pm

I don't agree with the assertio in the 1st sentance that the current face detection capability is not useful however I would LOVE to have face recognition.

I suggested face recognition 17 months ago (http://jamiethomson.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!550F681DAD532637!2561.entry) - disappointed not to see it in wave 3.

gregsedwards wrote on March 9, 2009, 9:48pm

Looks like the bang issue strikes again, Jamie. You'll have to TinyURL your links to make em work here, mate.

JJohnson wrote on March 26, 2009, 8:07pm

I would use WinLive Photo Gallery on a regular basis if it did this. I have several thousand pictures, and an auto-assist face tagging like the iLife or Picassa have would make my life so much easier.

Evaders99 wrote on June 5, 2009, 5:21am

100% agree - manually doing each photo is tedious "Identify, click Name, click Next, repeat"

helmet0628 wrote on July 23, 2009, 10:13pm

This would be huge and if they could also sync the contacts with Outlook, I dont use live mail for my email i use Outlook

speedline wrote on August 21, 2009, 1:56am

I find it hard to believe that no one, not even MS, has stepped up to the plate to offer something that Apple has been offering for a while now in iPhoto.

The current implementation of "face tagging" in WLPG is no different than plain tagging, except that it will identify faces and place a name with the face. As has been mentioned a number of times, WLPG should "learn" and actually recognize these faces and then provide some kind of functionality to automatically tag all the photos from an event/folder AND with the option to auto-tag the whole library of photos.

Its precisely this lack of any kind of automatic tagging that has stopped me from dedicating myself to any photo management application. I think it would be the killer feature for WLPG if it were implemented correctly.

speedline wrote on August 21, 2009, 1:57am

I find it hard to believe that no one, not even MS, has stepped up to the plate to offer something that Apple has been offering for a while now in iPhoto.

The current implementation of "face tagging" in WLPG is no different than plain tagging, except that it will identify faces and place a name with the face. As has been mentioned a number of times, WLPG should "learn" and actually recognize these faces and then provide some kind of functionality to automatically tag all the photos from an event/folder AND with the option to auto-tag the whole library of photos.

Its precisely this lack of any kind of automatic tagging that has stopped me from dedicating myself to any photo management application. I think it would be the killer feature for WLPG if it were implemented correctly.

Razvan wrote on March 8, 2010, 5:24pm

This feature needs some improvement. Without automatic face detection AND matching, it is almost useless.
For 2-3 photos it is ok to start clicking on the Info panel or dragging and dropping photos. But the moment you start having 500+ photos with 100+ persons spread out through the pictures (which is normal for a wedding shoot, or for people who see their families once a year..) it is simply too much to do.
I am hoping with all my heart we'll get some automatic tagging. I would be happy even if the tagging does not match absolutely all the faces but most of them.

MarkKB wrote on April 23, 2010, 12:58pm

This is apparently slated for Wave 4: http://www.liveside.net/main/archive/2010/03/20...on-and-photo-fuse.aspx

(Also, not to be a downer, but I'm not sure how this qualifies as a UI quirk - it's more of a feature request, isn't it?)

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