Face tagging by hand

[Pawel]

When there are photos where automatic face detection can not work (people facing off camera, visible from the back etc.) I use the option to add face annotation manually. Currently the process is quite time consuming:

• Click "smiley" to add new empty face annotation - new annotation frame is added in the center of the frame.
• Resize the annotation frame - IMatch takes a few seconds to update the face.
• Move the annotation to the correct place in the photo - IMatch takes a another few seconds to update the face. And if the size or place of the annotation is not right, every correction to the annotation takes another few seconds to update the face.
  
• Press F2 to assign person to the annotation.

Would it be possible to streamline this process so that it would be possible to:

• Press some key combination to enable "manual face annotation drawing mode".
• Draw the annotation in the choosen place of the photo.
• Press F2 to assign person to the annotation.

Then IMatch would take few seconds to "update the face" only once per face.

Would it be possible to add "manual face annotation drawing mode"?

[mastodon]

+1
I do a lot of face tagging by hand, too. It would be a nice feature. Would it be possible in the 3. to get the people selector with a right click?

[plastikman]

Both of the suggestions have my vote. It would make the progress smoother and keep the application more responsive.

[Mario]

You know that you can copy and paste face annotations between files?
Much quicker than doing it all by hand.

Just process the faces per person and you have a very fast workflow.

[plastikman]

The question boils down to how accurate does the face recognition have to be. But it is human nature to accurately want to draw the box around the face in a similar way across images. But I don't bother when there is auto detection, to be very fast I just copy the box of a person as you suggested but the problem/solution listed above would apply mostly when you hit the smiley in the viewer interface which I somehow happen to do quite a lot, mostly on individual images when I see there has been no face recognition, so your suggested copy method wouldn't really make this any better. 

But this definitely shouldn't be a low priority thing in the bigger scheme of things.

[mastodon]

I am copying face tags. Actually, I take one event and copy one persons face tag over the pictures, than another persons tag. But sometimes I found news ones (person), and that times it would come handy.

[Pawel]

You know that you can copy and paste face annotations between files?
Much quicker than doing it all by hand.

Just process the faces per person and you have a very fast workflow.

I know and try to use it as much as possible, however it is a rare occurence that annotation doesn't need to be repositioned nor resized between photos - and every correction means few seconds for an update of the face. Also when doing  "face annotation cleaning" on a photos that doesn't belong to a very specific event I prefer working photo after photo, using combination of auto and manual tagging, because people in the photos are so diverse that working person after person isn't very practical.

[claudermilk]

I'm currently doing a lot of this.

F6 gets you a blank face annotation (after Entering through the pop up dialog); I never use the annotation toolbox anymore--in fact I've squeezed it down to a narrow band along the right side.

As Mario said, you can also copy a face annotation. Then it's just Ctrl-V to drop one in. You can even do multiples. So a series of the same person or group is accelerated a lot.

Once the tag is in there you can Tab to it & hit F2 to open the person dialog.

At this point, I'm mostly waiting on IMatch to handle my drags and do background database updates, but it's much quicker than when I started the project.

One other process I'm doing (I think I saw a suggestion by Mario here in the forum or in the help) is to use the Face Manager to batch approve (or reject) unconfirmed faces. So that leaves me with just checking for undetected faces or some that I was not sure of from the little thumbnails. That sped things up a bunch.