How to disable assigning persons to faces

[Pawel]

As Mario said, every time I confirm (or reject) a face, the internal state of the IMatch face AI updates - unconfirmed faces or faces not assigned to a person yet are re-evaluated based on the new state.

Given that I wanted to temporarily disable this behaviour, what preferences should I set in "face rec" section of IMatch preferences?

Automatic Face Recognition = Yes (to enable face recognition on _new_ files)
Automatically assign persons to face = No

or both options to "No"?

[Mario]

Automatically assign persons to face: NO should do the trick.

But why do you want to do that? This will produce a ton of unassigned faces in your database...

[Pawel]

I wrote about my problem in community topic here.

There are several person records in my database that have several hundreds of unconfirmed faces each. My son, particularly, has about 2000 unconfirmed faces, of which maybe 100 are his and the rest is of random people (often similar in appearance to him). He already has about 4400 confirmed faces.

The problem is that as soon as I reject all the faces and click save in Face Manager the unconfirmed faces counter initially goes to zero or some very small number only to climb to similar number of faces after a while - and I can confirm or reject the same faces again. It looks like something was not updated in the database when I use Face Manager.

I tried setting "Automatically assign persons to faces" to No, but it didn't prevent that behaviour - only after I set both "Automatic Face Recognition" and "Automatically assign persons to faces" to No the faces don't come back.

I am sure this is not a standard IMatch behaviour and try to look for an error or some non-standard IMatch configuration on my side. So far I relocated all the pictures from "\\xxx.yyy.zzz.aaa\photos\..." to "\\dsa.lan\photos" (still with a dot in name but without IP address od the NAS). I tried to merge my son's person entry with another freshly created person - didn't help. I tried to rename his person record to avoid non-Latin characters - didn't help.

The only thing that is still non-standard in my configuration I think is that I've disabled writing IPTC records for several file formats in the Metadata2 tag of the preferences. Do you think it can be a problem or should I look elsewehere? Database Diagnosis doesn't show any errors nor warnings.

One more information: after I did rescan of all my 100k+ photos with "force update" I had over 50k unconfirmed faces in the database, now I managed to go to about 30k (often rejecting unconfirmed faces) - so there are about 20k unassigned and probably about 30k unconfirmed faces to work on. Maybe the number of faces is a problem?

[thrinn]

Is it possible that you have some File Relation rules that try to propagate face information?

[Mario]

Good point!

[Pawel]

Is it possible that you have some File Relation rules that try to propagate face information?

I don't think so. I used to have a lot of relations and propagating configured however in last few months I simplified the IMatch database setup considerably:

• Removed all face data and most of metadata from versions (out of camera JPGs and output files processed by Lightroom or CaptureOne)
• Removed all but three relations which don't propagate _anything_, even rating.

So, I only change metadata and face annotations in master files and don't propagate anything.

I also deleted most of data-driven categories and keywords from @Keywords category.

[Mario]

Review the rejected faces for your son. Not too many!
Review the trained faces for your son. Not too many. Maybe 5 or 10 max.

[Pawel]

I wonder if there is any structural problem with my database.

I tried to follow your advice and started to review trained faces for my son (there were like 15 of them) only to find, that in trained faces there are four faces of another person marked as rejected (orange frame) and with a "trained" indicator. When I try to untrain these faces and save changes, the "trained" indicator comes back.

I am sure these faces weren't in trained faces for my son before yesterday. Yesterday I searched for similar faces for the person involved and confirmed several faces - now I see them in my son's Face Manager as rejected and trained at the same time.

Is there anything I could do to check if my database isn't broken? Database diagnostics finished with no errors or some minor warnings, i run it regularly however it doesn't help with the situation.

[Mario]

If the diagnosis does not find anything, the database is OK.

Rejected + trained could happen in an older IMatch version. Are you sure you are using the latest version? 2020.5.6?
You can just un-reject the faces and then untrain them and reject them again.